Toni Morrison wrote the real history of America. Were just finally reading it

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Set us as preferred About six months after Toni Morrison died in the summer of 2019, Literary Cleveland began hosting annual community tribute parties on the Nobel Prize-winning author’s birthday, Feb.18.

Lorain, Ohio — a suburb of Cleveland — is where Morrison was born and raised, and where she set several of her novels.During these gatherings, participants were prompted to read aloud from their favorite Morrison works, and share why they savored those particular lines.

Over time, these meetings began to feel increasingly intimate, even “sacred,” according to Literary Cleveland’s Executive Director Matt Weinkam, which prompted him, in tandem with Ohio Humanities head Rebecca Asmo, to brainstorm how to take their program state-wide.“This is Toni Morrison, one of our greatest writers,” Weinkam recalls thinking.

“We needed to do something bigger.”At the time, Weinkam and Osmo were also trying to figure out how to commemorate America’s semiquincentennial.Weinkam was listening to Morrison’s entire oeuvre on audio and realized that when you organize the 11 novels in a certain order, “they tell the history of America.” So how, he thought, “could you use the literature of Toni Morrison to view our country through a different lens — through her lens?” He says they knew honoring Morrison as a consequential figure not just in literature but also in the context of American history would be central to Ohio’s celebration of the semiquincentennial.

“[But] only as the project was coming together did we strike on the fact that her novels trace American history from ‘A Mercy,’ set in1690, through ‘God Help the Child,’ in the 2010s.Not only does her work re-center African Americans in the story of our country, it also tackles major events from our founding, through slavery, to the impact of J...