A year later, she returned to the classroom for a year as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at State University of New York in Purchase, settled into a renovated boathouse outside Nyack, and continued to write. 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 about the horror of a mother's murdering her drug-addicted son: To some, the act was unforgivable; to others, the woman exhibited a mother's utmost love and courage. What none of the critics could have foreseen, however, was that Morrison's portrait of the drug-addicted son was an omen of ghetto life in the coming decades.
In 1974, an attraction to the lodestone of black literature led her to compile a memory album. Introduced by Bill Cosby as a "folk journey of Black America" and composed of bits and pieces from slave narratives, advertising, photographs, media clippings, recipes, and patent office records, The Black Book reveals three centuries of black history. Almost like remediation in the culture that her public education had denied her, the research, her "literary archeology," provided a cache of motifs, themes, and images for later fiction — including a clipping from a nineteenth-century magazine that would inspire Beloved.
During the next decade, while serving as a visiting lecturer at Yale, she finished Song of Solomon (1977), a Midwestern saga. Like a patchwork vision of her collective unconscious, the novel draws on family lore and a wisdom sprung from surviving. In Morrison's words, her forebears became "my entrance into my own interior life." True to the revelation of self, Song of Solomon, a mythic tale centering on slaves who fly to Africa, evolved from her grief over her father's death. The novel was awarded the 1978 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and eighteen years later, in 1996, it soared to the No. 1 position on bestseller lists nationwide when it was announced as a featured novel in Oprah Winfrey's monthly book club.
