Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Song of Solomon was the first book by an African-American writer to make the Book-of-the-Month Club’s main selection list since Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940.
Morrison says she never called herself a writer until after Song of Solomon was published.
As an undergrad at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Morrison spent summers touring the South with a student-faculty theatrical company at the university.
In 1988, 48 African-American writers wrote a letter to the New York Times protesting the fact that Morrison had not won a National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize.
Song of Solomon became a bestseller overnight when Oprah chose it for her book club 19 years after it was published.