Related Topics: Toni Morrison | Lesson Plan

SYNOPSIS:

The materially successful African-American businessman, Macon Dead, attempts to hide his working-class, Southern roots of the Dead family and to protect it from the life of African-Americans in his neighborhood. Macon Jr., nicknamed Milkman, rebels. Discovering heresay about the family's lost wealth, Milkman begins his journey to Pennsylvania and thence to rural Virginia to find it. There is neither gold nor land. However, after he drops some outward forms of civilization and undergoes an initiation into sensitivity and knowledge, he discovers and accepts his family's past and himself. At the end of the story, Milkman feels fully alive and human but strangely ready to die.

REVIEWS:

In this celebrated novel, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison
created a new way of rendering the contradictory nuances of black life
in America. Its earthy poetic language and striking use of folklore and
myth established Morrison as a major voice in contemporary fiction.

Song of Solomon begins with one of the most arresting scenes in our
century's literature: a dreamlike tableau depicting a man poised on a
roof, about to fly into the air, while cloth rose petals swirl above the
snow-covered ground and, in the astonished crowd below, one woman sings
as another enters premature labor. The child born of that labor, Macon
(Milkman) Dead, will eventually come to discover, through his
complicated progress to maturity, the meaning of the drama that marked
his birth. Toni Morrison's novel is at once a romance of self-discovery,
a retelling of the black experience in America that uncovers the
inalienable poetry of that experience, and a family saga luminous in its
depth, imaginative generosity, and universality. It is also a tribute to
the ways in which, in the hands of a master, the ancient art of
storytelling can be used to make the mysterious and invisible aspects of
human life apparent, real, and firm to the touch.(Oprah Book Club selection)

WEB SITE ADDRESSES:

Anniina's Toni Morrison Page

A comprehensive web site for all of Toni Morrison's books as well as biographies, interviews, and web resources.
http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/tonimorrison/toni.htm

TONI MORRISON 1993 Nobel Laureate in Literature

Book Store and featured Internet Links on Morrison.
http://www.almaz.com/nobel/literature/1993a.html