Jazz

novel by Morrison

Learn about this topic in these articles:

African American literature

  • Phillis Wheatley's first book of poetry
    In African American literature: African American roots

    Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for…

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American literature

  • John Smith: Map of Virginia
    In American literature: African American literature

    (1977), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998), Toni Morrison created a strikingly original fiction that sounded different notes from lyrical recollection to magic realism. Like Ellison, Morrison drew on diverse literary and folk influences and dealt with important phases of Black history—i.e., slavery in Beloved and the…

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discussed in biography

  • Toni Morrison
    In Toni Morrison: Nobel Prize

    In 1992 Morrison released Jazz, a story of violence and passion set in New York City’s Harlem during the 1920s; a research assistant on the book was Princeton student MacKenzie (Bezos) Scott. The following year she received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In her Nobel lecture, Morrison spoke of…

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