Linda Wagner-Martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. She has been a Guggenheim fellow, a Rockefeller awardee, and a resident at Bellagio, Bogliasco, and the Bunting Institute. She recently received the Hubbell Medal for lifetime service to American literature. Her 2013 A History of American Literature from 1950 to the Present is her 53rd book. She has written two other books for this series, one on Ernest Hemingway and the other, in both 1999 and 2003, on Sylvia Plath. She writes widely on twentieth-century American literature, biography, women's writing and pedagogy. Her publications include A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway (2000), William Faulkner: Six Decades of Criticism (2002), Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Hemingway: Eight Decades of Criticism (2009).

• Preface Acknowledgments and Conventions Introduction: Morrison's Early Years 1. Song of Solomon: The Beginning of Morrison's Career 2. Tar Baby and Other Folktales 3 Beloved, Beloved, Beloved . . . . 4 Jazz and Morrison's Trilogy: New York in the 1920s 5 Morrison as Public Intellectual 6 The Nobel Prize in Literature and Morrison's Trilogy 7 Morrison and the Twenty-first Century: Love 8 Morrison and Various Mercies 9 Morrison and the Definitions of Home Coda Notes Bibliography Index