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.
Within four years after Solomon's success, Morrison followed up with Tar Baby. A provocative departure from her earlier all-black casts, the novel introduces the ambivalent Jadine, a world-weary traveler who searches for self-actualization among West Indian servant-caste relatives through a brief fling with a furtive black interloper. Propelled by the novel's success, 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?"
Beloved was published in 1987. Returning to a focus on motherhood, the novel probes the pain of mothers who are slaves, revealed through the humiliation of Sethe, who kills one of her children rather than watch it grow to adulthood, when she would be brutally and repeatedly punished, robbed of a sense of self, and utterly debased by slavery.
