Toni Morrison, Editor: A Collective Interview with Dana A. Williams

Dana A. Williams’s long-awaited book Toni at Random is a revelatory portrait of the novelist from an unusual vantage point: her innovative and influential work as an editor at Random House from 1971 to 1983. Morrison famously pulled off an unprecedented juggling act, holding a full-time editorial career as one of the very few African American faces in senior roles in the trade publishing world while somehow finding time to complete Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Tar Baby (1981), as her own reputation as a novelist grew. The book raises fascinating questions not only about Morrison’s singular path but about the complex relationship between editorial practice and writerly practice in general, and about the position of African American literature in the US publishing landscape. As a book mainly concerned with the 1970s, Toni at Random can also be read as an intriguing if oblique reflection on the afterlives of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and the extensive efforts at institution building that had emerged in the previous decade, not only in the Black studies and African American studies programs that were founded in colleges and universities around the country but also in Black independent and small-press publishing.