Song of Solomon is Morrison's third novel and one of her most commercially successful. Published in 1977, the novel — tentatively titled Milkman Dead — was condensed in Redbook. It was later chosen as a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, which had not selected a novel written by a black author since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940. The same month in which it was published by Knopf, Song of Solomon was sold to New American Library, a paperback publisher, for an estimated $115,000 and quickly became a bestseller. Well over half a million copies are now in print, and translation rights have been sold in more than ten countries. The novel won fiction awards from the National Book Critics' Circle and the American Academy and Institute of Letters. It also won the National Book Award for best novel and made the front page of the New York Times Book Review. Since Morrison is known primarily for her "womanist" writings that portray the challenges of growing up black and female in a white, male-dominated culture, the phenomenal success of Song of Solomon, which features a black male protagonist, is especially remarkable. ("Womanist," according to Alice Walker, who coined the term, is the African-American equivalent of "feminist." Consequently, while feminists focus on sexism and strive for women's liberation and economic equity, womanists focus on both sexism and racism, demanding respect for the achievements and contributions of black women and recognition of the black woman as an integral part of the male-dominated black community.)
Morrison, asked why she chose a male protagonist for Song of Solomon, responded, "Because I thought he had more to learn than a woman would have." She also confessed to intentionally "trying to feel things that are of no interest to me but I think are of interest to men, like winning, like kicking somebody, like running toward a confrontation; that level of excitement when they are in danger." Drawing on a variety of stories, myths, and legends, the novel centers on two key stories: the Yoruba folktale of the flying Africans and Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs, the twenty-second book of the Old Testament.
