Toni Morrison’s literary critical life, as well as her critical literary life, began in earnest when she was in her late thirties. A single parent of two sons still in diapers, she moved to Syracuse, New York, a city where she knew no one. Working a day job as a senior editor at Random House’s textbook subsidiary L. W. Singer Publishing, she wrote fiction at night to fend off loneliness and to create stories about people like her—stories that she wanted to read but had never seen in print. Having stated more than once that she had originally intended to be a “reader,” not a writer, she turned a short story drafted for a local women writers’ support group into a disturbing novel initially filed by the Library of Congress as “adolescent fiction,” read in and then banned from various public schools. The Bluest Eye elicited absolutely no recognition from the Modern Language Association until five years after its 1970 copyright and nearly two years after Sula’s publication in 1973.

Morrison’s agonizingly slow critical start appears to rest upon three major cruxes: a culture in which ideologies of whiteness were founded on “an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American” (Playing in the Dark 38); the ongoing absence of a criticism that would locate writers like Morrison specifically as African American; and Morrison’s troublingly complex novels deliberately designed to unsettle readers. The Critical Life of Toni Morrison reveals, however, that her steady and steely efforts to overcome what may now seem surprising hurdles—Morrison was, after all, helping to lay the groundwork for a dramatic shift in the reviewing establishment’s attitude toward African American writers—allowed this multitalented artist and savvy businesswoman to catapult herself into a career—first as editor and then as writer—that literally changed the direction of American literature and criticism, elevated Morrison to the pantheon of “public intellectuals,” and gained her almost cult-like personal adulation.