Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison (1977)
“A Black man searches for his identity through his family's mythic past — and discovers that his ancestors could literally fly.”
At a Glance
Macon 'Milkman' Dead III grows up in a middle-class Michigan family disconnected from its roots. Guided by his eccentric aunt Pilate — a woman born without a navel — and pushed by his childhood friend Guitar's growing radicalism, Milkman travels south to find a cache of gold hidden by his grandfather, but instead discovers his family's mythic origins: the legend of Solomon, his great-great-grandfather who flew back to Africa and left his wife and twenty-one children behind. At the novel's end, Milkman leaps into the air toward Guitar — whether in death or in transcendence, Morrison refuses to say.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Song of Solomon was Toni Morrison's breakthrough — the first novel by a Black woman to be a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection since 1940. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award, established Morrison as a major American novelist, and laid the thematic and formal groundwork for Beloved. When Morrison won the Nobel Prize in 1993, the committee specifically cited its mythic power and its recovery of suppressed African American oral tradition.
Diction Profile
Formally literary in narration, steeped in African American vernacular in dialogue — a deliberate fusion that refuses to choose between the academy and the community
Extremely high