Linda Wagner-Martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature Emerita at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, USA. She has written and edited more than eighty books, has won a number of teaching awards, and such grants as the Guggenheim, the Senior National Endowment for the Humanities, ACLS, Ford, and Rockefeller-and been a fellow at Bellagio, Bogliasco, and the Radcliffe Institute. She was awarded the Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Service to American Literature. Her book The Life of the Author: Maya Angelou (2021) has been nominated for the Plutarch Prize. In the Palgrave Macmillan Literary Lives series, she has published works on Emily Dickinson (2013), Sylvia Plath (2003), John Steinbeck (2017), Walt Whitman (2021), and Ernest Hemingway (second edition, 2022).

Introduction: Morrison's Early Years

Song of Solomon: One Beginning of Morrison's Career

Tar Baby and Other Folktales.- Beloved, Beloved, Beloved

Jazz and Morrison's Trilogy: New York in the 1920s

Morrison as Public Intellectual

The Nobel Prize in Literature and Morrison's Trilogy

Morrison and the Twenty-first Century: Love.- Morrison and Various Mercies

Morrison and the Definitions of Home

God Help the Child.- The Origin of Others and The Source of Self-Regard

Coda