Toni Morrison's Definition of a Legacy

The Atlantic

5 hours ago

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In 2012, I visited the home of Toni Morrison, who was then 81, to discuss, among other things, her legacy. Morrison's Nobel Prize sat on her kitchen island. She had just published her penultimate novel, Home, and she was quietly but unabashedly engaged in making sure her work would be read as widely as possible. She recalled for me a recent visit to the University of Michigan, where 'my books were taught in classes in law, feminist studies, Black studies. Every place but the English department.' Even as a Nobel laureate, she worried that her work would be confined to courses on identity, shelved in a side room of the American literary pantheon. At the time, I found her efforts difficult to square with her lifelong insistence that she was ' writing for b lack people ' and no one else. Now, almost six years after her death, it makes more sense to me, especially after reading the essay that my colleague Clint Smith wrote about Toni at Random, a new book that tracks Morrison's parallel career as a book editor.
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In the 1970s, before Morrison was world-famous for her fiction, she worked at Random House, publishing writers who were uncompromising in their vision and advocacy for Black people—but she also had to appeal to a mass audience. This wasn't easy; she was a rare Black editor in a publishing industry that was mostly run by white people for white people. 'A salesman at a conference once told Morrison, 'We can't sell books on both sides of the street,'' Smith writes: 'There was an audience of white readers and, maybe, an audience of Black readers, he meant, but those literary worlds didn't merge.' Yet Morrison didn't believe Black writers had to cater to white audiences. They, too, could create 'something that everybody loves,' she said.
Morrison's writers were not middle-of-the-road types: They included Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Gayl Jones, and Muhammad Ali. But she protected their integrity while raising them to the highest standards, putting the same level of rigor into editing them that she brought to her own novels. She interrogated gauzy concepts and clarified ideas. She made their work unimpeachable. And she resisted efforts to make their memoirs more relatable. (After one reader asked for more 'humanness,' she wrote to her boss that that was 'a word white people use when they want to alter an 'uppity' or 'fearless'' Black person.) She believed that a book didn't have to be written for the broadest possible audience to be widely read. In one interview with The Guardian, while explaining her insistence on writing for a Black audience, she noted that Leo Tolstoy hadn't written his classic novels for her, 'a 14-year-old coloured girl from Lorain, Ohio.' Nonetheless, she recognized his brilliance, and white readers could recognize hers.
In her way, Morrison was offering a definition of a legacy: That a work reaches beyond not just the writer's lifespan, but her intended audience as well. In both her writing and her editing, Morrison was recording the experiences of Black Americans without looking over her shoulder at white readers or critics. She revealed that there was a market for Black literature on both sides of the street—but she also left an even more important mark. She succeeded, in the long term, not by carefully calibrating the work or by selling the 'humanness' of her characters and her writers, but by putting humanity plainly on the page, where it would outlast her and her critics alike.
How Toni Morrison Changed Publishing
By Clint Smith
At night, she worked on her novels. By day, as an editor at Random House, she championed a new generation of writers.
What to Read
Sex and the City, by Candace Bushnell
Before they became the show of the same name, Bushnell's columns in the pink pages of The New York Observer documented, with light fictionalizations, the sex and social lives of New York's ambitious and powerful—and her own, though she frequently disguised her run-ins as the affairs of her 'friend,' the character Carrie Bradshaw. In this volume of collected Observer columns, most of them focused on Carrie, Bushnell reveals herself to be a sage of power and social capital, an expert on relationships and how they can be used to build careers, accumulate social clout, and stomp on feelings. For anyone with a sense of ambition, whether you're moving somewhere new or settling down where you already are, her work is both an entertaining read and an instruction manual for how even the most casual acquaintanceships can transform your life. Cultivating them intentionally, Bushnell implicitly argues, can turn even the biggest metropolis into a small town where your next opportunity (or at the very least a good party) is just a conversation or two away. — Xochitl Gonzalez
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In a cramped, $50-a-month room above a New Jersey furnace-supply company, Peter Benchley set to work on what he once said, half-jokingly, might be 'a Ulysses for the 1970s.' A novel resulted from these efforts, one Benchley considered titling The Edge of Gloom or Infinite Evil before deciding on the less dramatic but more fitting Jaws. Its plot is exquisite in its simplicity. A shark menaces Amity, a fictional, gentrifying East Coast fishing village. Chaos ensues: People are eaten. Working-class residents battle with an upper-class outsider regarding the best way to kill the shark. The fish eventually dies in an orgy of blood. And the political sympathies of the novel are clear—it sides with the townspeople, and against the arrogant, credentialed expert who tries to solve Amity's shark problem.