In the summer of 2008, I was 19 years old, halfway through college, and an aspiring poet with a notebook full of earnest stanzas of questionable quality. I loved writing. I loved literature. As I considered what sort of career might suit me, I became curious about the life of a book editor. So I made my way to New York City for an internship I had received at a major publishing house. Joining me were four other interns—two Black women and two Asian women. The idea was to open industry doors to students from backgrounds underrepresented in the field.
I felt primed for the experience, fresh from a transformative college course that introduced me to the history of Black American letters, anchored by The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Published in 1996 by W. W. Norton and edited by the scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, the book traversed three centuries of writing, from the Negro spirituals of the 18th century to the poetry and prose of the late 20th century. This was the volume, many said, that had assembled and indexed a Black American literary canon for the first time. Toward the anthology’s close, I found myself spellbound by Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel, Sula, and intrigued by a single line in her biography: Not long after she published her first novel, “Morrison became a senior editor at Random House.”
I’d never known that Morrison had straddled the line between writer and editor. Perhaps naively, I hadn’t envisioned that someone could do both jobs at once, especially a writer of Morrison’s caliber. And I didn’t know then how many of the writers who surrounded her in the Norton volume—Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Leon Forrest, Toni Cade Bambara—as well as figures beyond the anthology, such as Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, and Huey P. Newton, had relied on Morrison to usher their books into the world. I certainly did not appreciate how dynamic—and complicated—both the art and the business of those collaborations had been for her.
Now readers can discover Morrison the bold and dogged editor, thanks to a deeply researched and illuminating new book, Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship, by Dana A. Williams, a scholar of African American literature and the dean of Howard University Graduate School. Decades of path-clearing and advocacy had preceded the Norton anthology, and Morrison, as the first Black woman to hold a senior editor position at the prominent publishing house, had played a major part. In a 2022 interview, Gates remarked that Random House’s hiring of Morrison, at the height of the civil-rights movement, was “probably the single most important moment in the transformation of the relationship of Black writers to white publishers.”
A pronouncement like that runs the risk of hyperbole, but Williams’s meticulous and intimate account of Morrison’s editorial tenure backs up the rhetoric. How Morrison handled the pressures of wielding her one-of-a-kind influence is fascinating—and, in retrospect, telling: As an editor, she was not just tenacious, but also always aware of how tenuous progress in the field could be. And it still can be: The recent departures of prominent Black editors and executives who helped diversify publishing’s ranks after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 are a stark reminder of that.
Morrison’s arrival at Random House in the late 1960s, a fraught and fertile moment, was well timed, though her route there wasn’t direct. She was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in 1931 in the midwestern steel town of Lorain, Ohio, to parents who, like so many millions of Black Americans in that era, had fled the racial violence of the South in search of safety and economic opportunities farther north. They recognized their daughter’s brilliance early (as did teachers) and began scraping together money to make college possible. Morrison went to Howard, majoring in English, minoring in classics, and throwing herself into theater. After getting a master’s degree in American literature from Cornell University and teaching at Texas Southern University, she went back to Howard in 1957 and spent seven years in the English department. She joined a writing group, whose members loved some pages she shared about a young Black girl who wishes her eyes were blue—the seeds of her debut novel, The Bluest Eye.
Morrison also married, had a child, and divorced, before returning home to Ohio in 1964, pregnant and in search of a new start. One day not long after, three copies of the same issue of The New York Review of Books were accidentally delivered, carrying an ad for an executive-editor job at a small textbook publisher in Syracuse that had recently been acquired by Random House. Morrison’s mother said the mistake was a sign that she should apply. Morrison’s first novel was still several years off, and she needed a steady job that would allow her to focus on her writing in the evenings. She was hired and spent a few years at the publisher before it was fully absorbed by Random House, one of whose top executives had been struck by her intellect and editorial adroitness. She was soon offered a job as an editor on the trade, or general interest, side. She accepted.
Amid racial upheaval and widespread student protests, Black studies and African studies were on the rise, transforming how the history, literature, and culture of the Black diaspora were taught. “I thought it was important for people to be in the streets,” Morrison later said. “But that couldn’t last. You needed a record. It would be my job to publish the voices, the books, the ideas of African Americans. And that would last.”
Her galvanizing insight as an editor was that “a good writer,” as Williams puts it, “could show the foolishness of racism,” as well as the many facets of Black life, “without talking to or about white people at all.” Morrison came to appreciate the power of directly exploring the inner and outer dimensions of Black life as she edited two groundbreaking anthologies: one that brought together some of the best African fiction writers, poets, and essayists, Contemporary African Literature, and another called The Black Book, which documented Black American history and daily experience through archival documents, cultural artifacts, and photographs. A frustration with the focus she found in the work of some homegrown Black writers also shaped her thinking. As she said later,
I realized that with all the books I’d read by contemporary Black American writers—men that I admired, or was sometimes disturbed by—I felt they were not talking to me. I was sort of eavesdropping as they talked over my shoulder to the real (white) reader. Take Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: That title alone got me. Invisible to whom?
Morrison recognized, Williams writes, that this “editorial aesthetic” of hers made her work harder. Famous for giving its editors unusual freedom, Random House was all for unearthing new writers and creating a new readership. Still, reaching a general audience remained a trade publisher’s mandate. A salesman at a conference once told Morrison, “We can’t sell books on both sides of the street”: There was an audience of white readers and, maybe, an audience of Black readers, he meant, but those literary worlds didn’t merge. “Well, I’ll just solve that,” Morrison decided. She was determined to “do something that everybody loves” without losing sight of her commitment to Black readers.
To pull off that feat, Morrison’s mode was to be relentlessly demanding—of herself, her authors, and her Random House colleagues. She tailored her rigorous style to the varied array of Black writers she didn’t hesitate to pitch to her bosses. But whether she was editing her high-profile nonfiction authors—Newton, the Black Panther leader, and others—or largely unknown and highly unconventional fiction writers, among them Gayl Jones, her protective impulse stands out.
As they worked on their books with Morrison, Newton as well as the activist Davis resisted the pressure to lean into the sort of personal reflections the public was curious about, and she supported them, while insisting that their thinking be clearly laid out. For Newton’s 1972 collection of writings, To Die for the People, that meant tossing weak early essays and reediting the rest, even those that had already been published. But her aim was not to present his ideas “all smoothed out,” Williams writes. Morrison emphasized that “contradictions are useful” in accurately tracing the evolution of the Black Panther Party away from a focus on armed revolution and toward the goal of creating social infrastructure within communities, offering programs such as free breakfast for students. She felt that a reflective Newton should emerge from the book’s pages. Aware of the public narrative that positioned the Panthers as unhinged, violent racial nationalists, Morrison encouraged him to describe “what he believes are errors in judgment in the Party line behavior.”
She worked more intimately with Davis, whom she sought out right after Davis’s acquittal on charges of murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy (resulting from a courthouse raid in which guns that were registered to Davis were used). For a time, Davis even moved in with Morrison and her two sons, then living in Spring Valley, New York. As they progressed through what became Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), their friendship seems to have made Morrison fiercer in deflecting calls for more personal revelation (which she considered sexist code for sensational romantic-life details). She bridled at one reader’s report asking for, among other things, more signs of Davis’s “humanness” in the draft. In a memo to Random House’s editor in chief, Morrison remarked that humanness is “a word white people use when they want to alter an ‘uppity’ or ‘fearless’ ” Black person.
At the same time, she pushed Davis for more vivid storytelling, and less academic vagueness in her account of her political life, her time in prison, her trial. At one point, Morrison chided her that “humanity is a vague word in this context,” evidently referring to Davis’s discussion of incarceration:
You repeat the idea frequently throughout so it is pivotal. “Breaking will” is clear; forcing prisoners into childlike obedience is also clear; but what is erode their humanity. Their humaneness? Their natural resistance?
Morrison bore down on publicity for the book too, famous though its author already was. She secured a blurb from the well-known British leftist Jessica Mitford, who wrote about prison reform too. Still, Morrison’s commitment to Black readership was unrelenting, and Random House arranged to provide hosts of book parties for Davis in Black communities with copies at a 40 percent discount. The party conveners could sell them at regular price and keep the profit.
Always on the lookout for new talent, Morrison asked friends who taught in creative-writing departments to send promising work by their students her way. In 1973, she dug into a box of manuscripts sent by the poet Michael Harper at Brown University. The writer was Gayl Jones, then in her early 20s, and Morrison was stunned by her narratively experimental prose. “This girl,” she felt, “had changed the terms, the definitions of the whole enterprise” of novel writing. Morrison, confessing that she was “green with envy,” immediately set up a meeting with Jones and soon persuaded the higher-ups at Random House to give her a book deal. She and Jones turned first to the draft of a novel titled Corregidora, which tackled the sexual exploitation of women entrapped in slavery, and its psychological and spiritual toll, in a more devastating and effective way than Morrison had ever encountered.
Spurred on by her fervent belief in Jones’s talent, Morrison was determined to ensure that Corregidora made an impression, well aware of how a successful debut could define a fiction writer’s career—particularly that of a Black woman fiction writer. She set exacting standards, bluntly calling Jones out when she thought she was taking shortcuts: “For example, Ursa’s song ought to be a straight narrative of childhood sexual fears,” she wrote to Jones, and went on: “May Alice and the boys—the fragments are really a cop out. You know—being too tired or impatient to write it out.” Understanding how shy Jones was, Morrison joined her for interviews and used her own literary capital (Sula had recently appeared to acclaim) to advocate for her work. “No novel about any black woman can ever be the same after this,” Morrison declared in a 1975 article in Mademoiselle.
Two years later, with the publication of Song of Solomon, Morrison also saw how her stature could get in the way. “In terms of new kinds of writing, the marketplace receives only one or two Blacks,” she later lamented in an interview in Essence magazine, wishing that the books she edited and published sold as well as the ones she wrote. In 1978, after the publication of Jones’s second novel, Eva’s Man, and a story collection, White Rat, Morrison’s once-close relationship with her unraveled amid mounting tensions with Jones’s partner; he had begun to represent Jones, and his behavior had become ever more erratic and aggressive.
By then, Morrison had just published a second novel by Leon Forrest, whose debut, There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden, had been a daunting, and thrilling, foray into novel-editing for her, back at the start of the decade. Together they had worked on an introductory section, describing the novel’s large cast of characters, not just to help readers but to orient Morrison herself as she went through the whole manuscript—and to get Random House’s editor in chief to offer Forrest a contract. With a foreword by Ralph Ellison (Morrison saw that two pages of comments he’d sent in would serve that purpose well), the novel was hailed for its risk taking and, Williams writes, for dwelling “in Blackness without reducing Blackness to an object of racism.” Though Forrest’s books lost money, Morrison’s support never wavered, and Random House, following her lead, stuck with him.
After scaling back on editing for a while, Morrison officially left Random House in 1983. She was eager to stop working on her fiction at night and “in the automobile and places like that,” she joked, and also to stop feeling “guilty that I’ve taken some time away from a full-time job.” The hard-driving editorial mission that had defined nearly two decades of Morrison’s life had never been peripheral for her—and hindsight reveals what a versatile catalyst she’d been in American literary culture. Though her departure was a boon for her own writing, it came at a cost. The number of Black authors who were published by Random House nose-dived after she left.
That probably didn’t come as a big surprise to Morrison. Seven years earlier, speaking at a conference on the past and future of Black writing in the United States, she had a message for the audience of major Black writers and critics: Don’t expect structural racism within and beyond publishing to disappear—but also don’t let that stop you. “I think that the survival of Black publishing, which to me is a sort of way of saying the survival of Black writing, will depend on the same things that the survival of Black anything depends on,” she said, “which is the energies of Black people—sheer energy, inventiveness and innovation, tenacity, the ability to hang on, and a contempt for those huge, monolithic institutions and agencies which do obstruct us. In other words, we must do our work.”
This article appears in the August 2025 print edition with the headline “How Toni Morrison Changed Publishing.”
The post How Toni Morrison Changed Publishing appeared first on The Atlantic.
