Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon has sold 570,000 copies as of 2019
Her novel Beloved has over 355,000 ratings, and is the most popular Toni Morrison book, according to Goodreads.
Beloved is also regarded as one of the most important works of American literature.
Toni Morrison’s net worth at the time of her death was at $20 million.
Noted by Virginia Scope, Beloved was #6 on Amazon’s movers and shakers list as of Oct 27 2021; representing books with the biggest sales gains in 24 hours.
Beloved was also #43 on Amazon’s bestselling books list on Oct 28, 2021 and came in at #2 in Black and African American literature and contemporary literature and fiction.
48 writers signed a letter of protest accusing the publishing industry of oversight when Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye missed out on its shortlisting for the National Book Award.
How many books has Toni Morrison written?
Toni Morrison has written a total of 11 Novels, 2 Short Fictions, 3 Plays, 13 Non-Fictions, 1 Article, and Co-Authored 7 Children’s Books along with her son Slade Morrison.
Morrison’s best known works are her Novels, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved and her Non-Fiction volumes; Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination and Remember.
Toni Morrison books in order
Novels
Title
Page Count
Released
Audio Length
The Bluest Eye
224
1970
7 hrs 6 mins
Sula
192
1973
5 hrs 47 mins
Song of Solomon
337
1977
15 hrs 28 mins
Tar Baby
764
1981
11 hrs 27 mins
Beloved
324
1987
12 hrs 3 mins
Jazz
256
1992
3 hrs 0 mins
Paradise
720
1997
15 hrs 19 mins
Love
208
2003
7 hrs 45 mins
A Mercy
208
2008
6 hrs 26 mins
Home
160
2012
4 hrs 30 mins
God Help the Child
192
2015
5 hrs 45 mins
Children’s books (with Slade Morrison)
Title
Page Count
Released
The Big Box
48
1999
The Book of Mean People
48
2002
Remember: The Journey to School Integration
80
2004
Who’s Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper?, The Lion or the Mouse, Poppy or the Snake?
40
2007
Peeny Butter Fudge
32
2009
Little Cloud and Lady Wind
32
2010
Please, Louise
32
2012
Non-Fiction
Title
Release
Foreword, The Black Photographers Annual Volume 1
1973
Foreword and Preface, The Black Book
1974
Foreword, Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality.
1992
Co-editor, Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case
1997
Remember: The Journey to School Integration
2004
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
2007
What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction
2008
Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word
2009
The Origin of Others – The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Harvard University Press
2017
Goodness and the Literary Imagination: Harvard Divinity School’s 95th Ingersoll Lecture: With Essays on Morrison’s Moral and Religious Vision.
2019
The Source of Self-Regard: Essays, Speeches, Meditations. New York: Alfred A. Knopf
2019
Short Fiction
Title
Release
Recitatif
1983
Sweetness
2015
Poetry
Title
Release
Five Poems
2022
Articles
Title
Release
“Introduction.” Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
1885
Who is Toni Morrison?
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18,1931 in Lorain, Ohio.
Morrison grew up in the Midwest of America in a family with heavy appreciation for Black culture. Storytelling, songs, and folktales were a constant part of childhood due to her fathers stories, which were taken from American tradition.
These stories became a huge element in Morrison’s own writing.
In 1953 she attended Howard University and Cornell University in 1955.
Toni Morrison’s work
After 2 years of teaching at Texas Southern University she then taught at Howard for several years.
Morrison became a fiction editor in 1965 at Random House, where she promoted the works of Black authors, such as the well known Angela Davis and Muhammed Ali.
Morrison later began teaching and writing at the State University of New York at Albany in 1984.
After 5 years teaching in State University she joined the faculty of Princeton University.
Morrison began work on her first novel in 1961 while at Harvard University.
However she did not make her debut as a novelist with The Bluest Eye until 1970.
Three years after Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, she released her second novel Sula.
Toni Morrison’s awards
Sula was the first of Morrison’s novels to receive major accolades and was nominated for the National Book Award in 1975, all while still receiving excellent reviews on The Bluest Eye.
In 1987 Toni Morrison’s Beloved is considered her true masterpiece and has won a number of awards, including the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Morrison became a professor at Princeton University in 1989 where she later established The Princeton Atelier in 1994 with the purpose of fostering artistic collaboration in young creators.
In recognition of the author and all she has contributed to literary culture, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Toni Morrison was the first African American woman ever to receive the Nobel Prize and her acceptance speech is an acclaimed work of literature in its own right.
In 2012 Morrison was awarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by friend and President Barack Obama, this award being the highest civilian award in the United States and is only given to 13 individuals.
In 2019 her final book, the essay collection Mouth Full of Blood, was published.
Toni Morrison died in 2019 in Bronx, New York on August 5th.
Toni Morrison wrote about language with extraordinary care and precision, shaping how a generation understood both words and the world. WordsRated publishes hints for today’s Wordle every day, our Word Finder helps find words from any letters, and you can unscramble any word instantly. Check today’s NYT Strands with our Today’s Strands Hint.
