Song of Solomon

An American Myth

Song of Solomon is Toni Morrison’s most expansive novel — a book that wants to be and becomes an American myth, drawing on African American folk tradition, Biblical allusion, the specific history of slavery and its aftermath, and the internal geography of Black family life across a century and a continent.

Macon Dead III, called Milkman by a neighborhood that witnessed his mother breastfeeding him past infancy, grows up in a prosperous Michigan family — his father a property-obsessed landlord, his mother Ruth dead-endedly devoted to a dead father, his aunt Pilate living in a shack with a bag of bones and a fearless interior life. Milkman is selfish, unfocused, and vaguely aware that he is missing something he cannot name. A story about family gold sends him south, and what he finds changes what the novel has been about from the beginning.

Pilate Dead

Toni Morrison created many extraordinary characters across a career of extraordinary characters. Pilate Dead — Milkman’s aunt, born without a navel, who has shed every social convention that doesn’t serve her and found complete internal authority — is perhaps the greatest of them. She is simultaneously deeply grounded in her community and outside every conventional measure of respectability. She distills wine, loves exactly whom she chooses, carries her dead father’s voice in her ear, and walks through the novel as the only character who knows fully who she is.

The novel suggests, quietly but firmly, that Pilate is what freedom looks like — and that Milkman will have to understand her before he can understand himself.

The Flying Motif

The novel opens with a man attempting to fly off a building. It ends with an act of literal or metaphorical flight — the ambiguity is deliberate — that reclaims a folk tradition Morrison traces from slavery’s necessary dream of escape to its embodiment in the legendary Solomon, Milkman’s ancestor. The arc from one end of the novel to the other is one of American literature’s most beautiful structural achievements.

Names and Their Power

The novel is obsessively concerned with names: their imposition, their loss, their reclamation. Macon Dead is a name given by a drunken Union soldier to a freed slave who could not spell his name. The DeadFamily is named for an administrative error. Milkman’s journey south is partly a journey back into names before the error — toward who his people were before naming rights were taken from them.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — Morrison’s most mythically ambitious novel, written in prose of extraordinary beauty and structured around an American odyssey that transforms family history into something permanently larger.

Reading Guides

• Books Like Beloved: Historical Fiction About Trauma, Memory, and Survival
• Books Like Homegoing: Multigenerational African Diaspora and the Long Shadow of Slavery
• Books Like The Underground Railroad: Slavery, Freedom, and the Impossible Journey North

National Book Critics Circle Award and Recognition

Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977, the year of its publication, and became Toni Morrison’s first major commercial success. It was selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club — the first novel by a Black American author to be so selected since Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940 — and entered the bestseller lists, establishing Morrison’s reputation with a wide readership beyond the literary community that had already recognised her work.

The recognition was deserved but also overdue. Morrison had published The Bluest Eye in 1970 and Sula in 1973 — two formally remarkable novels that received serious critical attention but not the commercial recognition their quality warranted. Song of Solomon is larger in scope and more mythologically ambitious than either predecessor, and it was the novel that made visible to a general audience what literary readers had already understood: that Morrison was engaged in a project of extraordinary depth and ambition.

The Novel’s Engagement with Black American History

Song of Solomon spans roughly a century of Black American history — from the post-Reconstruction era through the Civil Rights period of the 1960s — and engages directly with the history of racial violence, including the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, in the character of Guitar Bains and the Seven Days organisation he belongs to. Guitar is Milkman’s closest friend and, gradually, his most dangerous adversary: a man whose grief over racial violence has hardened into a systematic philosophy of retributive killing.

Morrison refuses to make Guitar simply a villain. His arguments are coherent; his grievances are real; the historical violence he responds to is documented. The novel does not endorse what he becomes, but it insists on understanding how he became it — how grief, without adequate outlet or justice, can transform into something indistinguishable from what it originally mourned.

Morrison’s Prose at Its Peak

Song of Solomon is the Morrison novel in which her prose reaches its most sustained lyrical height. The writing in The Bluest Eye is formally experimental and sometimes deliberately harsh; the writing in Sula is compressed to the point of austerity. Here, Morrison allows herself to be expansive: the language is rich, rhythmic, shot through with biblical cadence and folk-song pattern, and capable of describing the ordinary textures of Black American domestic life — the food, the arguments, the intimacies — with the same loving precision it brings to Milkman’s mythological quest.

The flying motif that culminates the novel is not decorative. Morrison traces it from the African folk belief that certain people could simply fly — an image of freedom and escape that persisted through slavery as a dream and as a coded communication — through the specific mythology of Solomon, who flew back to Africa leaving behind his children and their grief. What Milkman discovers at the novel’s end is not just his family name but the full weight of what that name means, and what was given up so that he could exist to discover it.