During the next decade, visiting lecturer posts drew Morrison to Yale from 1975–1977 and Bard College from 1979–1980. The need to express beliefs and truths from her active imagination led in 1977 to the publication of Song of Solomon, a Midwestern saga strongly influenced by the death of her father. Like a patchwork vision of her collective unconscious, the novel draws on family lore and a wisdom sprung from survival. In Morrison's words, her forebears became "my entrance into my own interior life." Song of Solomon is a mythic tale centering on slaves who fly to Africa. The novel's success, a popular television interview with Dick Cavett, and inclusion in the PBS series "Writers in America" brought Toni Morrison to the forefront of American fiction.
Within four years, Morrison followed up on the promise of earlier works with Tar Baby. In a provocative departure from her earlier all-black casts, Tar Baby introduced the ambivalent Jadine, a world-weary traveler who searches for self-actualization among West Indian servant-caste relatives through a brief fling with a mysterious black man. Critics were divided as to the direction that Morrison seemed to be moving as she departed from less familiar themes, characters, and settings. Nonetheless, Morrison became the first black woman championed in a cover story for Newsweek, which heralded her as the top black writer in the United States. Her response was a teasing one-liner: "Are you really going to put a middle-aged, gray-haired, colored lady on the cover of this magazine?"
