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.”
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.
Firsts & Innovations
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
Cultural Impact
Won the National Book Critics Circle Award (1977)
Selected for Oprah's Book Club — reached millions of readers who had not previously encountered Morrison
Became one of the most taught novels in American universities — standard in AP English and college literature courses
Influenced an entire generation of Black writers who took Morrison's mythic mode and oral tradition as formal permission
The 'flying Africans' motif, amplified by this novel, became a touchstone in African American cultural studies and was drawn on in art, music, and other literature
Banned & Challenged
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.