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.”
Song of Solomon— Historical Context & Author Background
Author: Toni Morrison · Published 1977· Era: Contemporary / African American Literature·337 pages
Themes explored: identity, flight, ancestry, race, class, masculinity, naming, freedom
About Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison (1931-2019), born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, was working as a senior editor at Random House when she wrote Song of Solomon — championing writers like Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and Angela Davis while writing her own fiction at night. Song of Solomon was her third novel and her breakthrough: it became the first novel by a Black author to be a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Morrison would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 — the first Black woman to do so. She drew on African American folk traditions, her own family's Midwestern migration story, and the flying African legend that she encountered in her research and community.
Life → Text Connections
How Toni Morrison's real experiences shaped specific elements of Song of Solomon.
Morrison grew up in Lorain, Ohio — a steel mill town where Black Southern migrants had settled during the Great Migration
Milkman's Michigan city mirrors the Northern industrial destinations of the Great Migration — communities formed by people who had left the South and slowly lost connection to what they left behind
The novel is, among other things, about what the Great Migration cost in ancestral disconnection. Morrison lived the Northern side of that story.
As an editor at Random House, Morrison was consciously building a Black literary tradition — collecting, preserving, and amplifying African American voices
The novel's central argument that oral tradition is a form of historical record as valid as written history mirrors Morrison's editorial project of treating Black vernacular and folk tradition as literature
Morrison was doing in her editorial life what the novel argues for: recovering and preserving what the dominant culture refused to write down.
Morrison was a single mother of two sons while writing the novel
The novel's sustained interrogation of Black masculinity — what it costs men to build selfhood in a racist society, what it costs women when that selfhood-building uses them as materials — carries the specificity of someone watching men she loved navigate these pressures
The Milkman-Hagar relationship, in particular, is written with the anger of someone who has seen this dynamic from the inside.
The 'flying Africans' folk legend — enslaved people who could fly back to Africa — circulated in African American communities, particularly from the Georgia Sea Islands
Solomon's flight is the novel's mythic core — Morrison uses a real folk tradition as her structural center, treating it with full mythic seriousness rather than anthropological distance
Morrison's choice to treat the flying legend as literally true (within the novel's world) rather than as metaphor is her most radical formal decision. It insists that African American folk tradition is not 'magical thinking' but a different epistemology.
Historical Era
Novel published 1977; set across approximately 1930s-1960s Michigan and Virginia
How the Era Shapes the Book
The novel's temporal span — from Macon Dead I's murder in the post-Reconstruction South through Milkman's journey in the early 1960s — maps the full arc of the Great Migration and its psychological costs. Morrison is writing about what was gained (safety, economic opportunity, Northern education) and what was lost (ancestral land, oral tradition, community rootedness, the knowledge encoded in Southern Black culture). The Seven Days subplot directly engages the Civil Rights era debate: is nonviolence a moral position or a form of complicity? Guitar represents the position that had no patience for that question.
Why Song of Solomon Matters Historically
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.
- First novel by a Black author to be a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection since Richard Wright's Native Son (1940)
- One of the first major American novels to use African American folk tradition (the flying Africans legend) as structural mythology rather than anthropological curiosity
- Pioneered the use of the naming motif as a sustained formal device throughout a novel's entire architecture
- Established magical realism as a viable mode for African American literature — treating the mythic as real without irony
Regularly challenged and removed from school curricula for sexual content (the nursing scene, Milkman's sexual relationships), language, and violence. The American Library Association has listed it among the most frequently challenged books. It has been removed from reading lists in Virginia, Texas, Michigan, and elsewhere — a geography that includes the very states whose histories the novel excavates.