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    A Study Guide for Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon
    A Study Guide for Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon
    A Study Guide for Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon
    Ebook38 pages29 minutes

    A Study Guide for Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 30, 2015
    ISBN9781535833639
    A Study Guide for Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon - Gale

      1

      Song of Solomon

      Toni Morrison

      1977

      Introduction

      Toni Morrison's third novel, Song of Solomon, established her as a major American writer. The story of a Black man's search for his identity through a discovery of his family history, it became a bestseller and drew praise from readers and critics when it was published in 1977. The novel has been especially admired for the beauty of its language and its grounding of universal themes in the particularity of the African-American experience, as well as for its use of folklore.

      Song of Solomon is based on an African-American folktale about slaves who can fly back to Africa when they choose. Morrison fictionalizes this folktale through the character of Solomon, the great-grandfather of the story's protagonist, Milkman Dead. Through his discovery of the story of Solomon and his ability to fly, Milkman learns to take pride in his ancestry and to value his connections to family and community. Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1977. It is now widely taught, and appeared again on best-seller lists when it was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for inclusion in her book club. Beloved by readers for more than twenty years, it is still considered one of Morrison's best books.

      Author Biography

      Like her character Milkman Dead, Toni Morrison came of age in a family that had only recently left the South and moved to the Midwest. Her mother's family migrated north from Greenville, Alabama, around the turn of the century as part of the Great Migration of southern Blacks to the urban North. Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931—the same year as Milkman Dead's birth—in Lorain, Ohio, where her first book, The Bluest Eye, is set. She recalled a childhood in which she was intimate with the supernatural, and read the classics of the Western tradition.

      Morrison graduated from Howard University and took a master's degree at Cornell, then returned to Howard to teach, including among her students Claude Brown and Stokely Carmichael. While at Howard, she married a Jamaican architectural student named Harold Morrison, the father of her two sons. After a later divorce, she started her first novel, The Bluest Eye, which was published in 1970. Also that year, Morrison began work on Sula, her second novel, and took a job as an editor at Random House, where she worked with some of the prominent Black authors of the 1970s.

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