"When they say I'm a great American novelist," Toni Morrison commented to Gail Caldwell in an interview published in Conversations with Toni Morrison, "I say, 'Ha! They're trying to say I'm not black.' When they say I'm a wonderful woman novelist, I think, 'Aha, they think I don't belong.' So I've just insisted--insisted!--upon being called a black woman novelist. And I decided what that meant . . ." Since the beginning of her career as a writer, Morrison has defined not only her own identity, but that of a group of people who had--she asserts-- repressed their own. As Denise Heinze elaborated in Dictionary of Literary Biography, "Morrison celebrates the rich heritage and language of the black community and the values it struggles to maintain in a predominantly white society whose own value system, she finds, has lost its collective way."

Morrison fought for, and restored, a vital...