TONI AT RANDOM

The Nobel Prize winner had a storied career as an editor.

Literary scholar Williams draws on interviews and archives to chronicle the publishing career of Toni Morrison (1931-2019), who served as a senior editor at Random House beginning in 1972. After earning a master’s degree in English from Cornell, Morrison taught at Howard University before taking an editorial job at L.W. Singer, a small textbook publishing house that had been recently acquired by Random House. When Random House decided to close the Singer offices, Morrison came to their attention as a likely editor who could further the publisher’s goal of attracting Black writers to their list. Williams closely examines some of the prominent books Morrison edited (a full list is appended), the authors she worked with (Muhammad Ali, for one), and her strategies for publicizing them. Through astute marketing and promotion, Morrison was convinced that she could build a Black book-buying audience and move Black culture “from the margin to the center.” Her first project was an anthology, Contemporary African Literature, intended as a high school textbook but also aimed at a general readership. The book, Williams writes, “quietly announced Morrison’s editorial aesthetic.” Another early project was The Black Book, a compendium of photos, posters, memorabilia—similar to The Whole Earth Catalog—that Morrison saw as a “folk journey of Black America.” Morrison was a hands-on editor, providing years-long writing guidance to her authors, helping to choose titles (she suggested the title for Williams’ book) and cover art, soliciting blurbs, and managing publicity. She often forged close friendships with her writers, including Toni Cade Bambara and Angela Davis. Engaged in her own writing at the same time that she worked at Random House, Morrison, Williams amply shows, was a paragon of “fearless determination.”

A well-researched biographical study.