Morrison's third novel follows Macon "Milkman" Dead III, born in a Michigan city on the day after an insurance agent named Robert Smith leapt from a hospital roof in an announced attempt to fly. Raised in the emotionally airless household of his landlord father, Macon Dead II, and his mother Ruth, Milkman drifts through a privileged, purposeless youth, entangled with his friend Guitar Bains and his cousin and lover Hagar, while his aunt Pilate — born without a navel, keeper of songs, bones, and family memory — embodies everything his father rejected. Sent south in search of a rumored cache of gold, Milkman instead recovers a genealogy: in Danville, Pennsylvania, and Shalimar, Virginia, he pieces together the story of his great-grandfather Solomon, who legend says flew back to Africa, and learns to read the children's song that has carried his family's names all along. Guitar, meanwhile, has joined a secret society exacting retributive killings, and the two men's paths converge in a final confrontation over what flight means. Blending family saga, quest narrative, folklore, and biblical naming, the novel became Morrison's breakthrough to a wide readership, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was later cited in her Nobel Prize recognition.
Author: Toni Morrison · Original publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York), 1977
