As a senior editor, Morrison became immersed in contemporary literature and was aware of an upsurge in black literary voices. Buoyed by this upsurge, in 1969, she returned to the classroom for a year as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at State University of New York in Purchase. She settled into a renovated boathouse outside the town of Nyack and kept writing. Four years later, she completed Sula, her second novel, which continues her demarcation of the black woman's world, with its secret power, perversity, unity, and mysticism. The critics were divided on the character's murder of her drug-dealing son, a sign of something sinister and unsettling and an omen of ghetto life in the coming decades. More popular than The Bluest Eye, the second novel was excerpted in Redbook and featured as a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate.
As Morrison's name began to take on public recognition, her byline appeared more frequently on book reviews for the New York Times. In 1974, she compiled a memory album, The Black Book, which was introduced by Bill Cosby as a "folk journey of Black America." Composed of oddments from slave narratives, advertising, photographs, media clippings, recipes, and patent office records, the book revealed three centuries of black history in the United States. The research was almost like a remedial cultural education for Morrison — an education that had been denied previously. Her "literary archeology" provided a cache of motifs, themes, and images for later fiction. It also unearthed a clipping from a nineteenth-century magazine that would inspire Beloved.
