Kyle C's Reviews > Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship

At the end of Beloved, Toni Morrison's fifth novel but her first after she left her job as an editor, the narrator describes how the title character Beloved will linger on in the photograph of every black person, an indelible and haunting memory, not simply of an infant girl brutally murdered in a shed but of every enslaved African ferried over the Atlantic, of every fugitive who sought freedom beyond the Mason-Dixon line, of every black child left unloved. Dana Williams' biography has given new meaning to this final image of Morrison's incredible book. Toni Morrison herself, as a novelist but equally importantly as an editor, made herself one of the de facto archivists of black life in the United States. In her role at Random House, she continually sought to find and promote black authors. She guided the book industry through the civil rights era and the black power movement, helping to champion and elevate black voices and perspectives for the moment. She sought to make marginalized writers not simply heard but profitable and she expanded the reading market, proving that experimental, technical, polarizing, difficult, and long, books could have popular appeal and civic value. In that light, Beloved is not the novel of an author retiring from her day job; it is the culmination of her work as a curator of black history and literature.

Anyone who reads knows that Toni Morrison is the preeminent bard of American literature but this book shows a different side to the author—the editor, the boss. With her substantial research, Dana Williams exhaustively documents the enormous influence Toni Morrison had on 20th-century American publications. Morrison's influence extended over multiple genres: she organized anthologies on African literature; she promoted the textbooks of emerging black scholars on art and science, on a vast array of topics from ethnomusicology to the history of railways; she counseled academics on how to turn their textbooks into trade-books; she secured the publishing rights for new novelists as well as forgotten dead ones; she provided detailed line-edits to cookbooks; she offered feedback on photoessays; she helped organize short-story collections; she shepherded poetry books into publication, even though Random generally shied away from these less commercial genres. Her work as an editor was all-encompassing and went beyond the office: she shared her home with Angela Davis and encouraged her to combine academic theory with autobiographical reflections. She discovered and mentored talented writers (Gayl Jones for one) and she also hounded famous celebrities (such as Muhammed Ali) and their ghostwriters as they failed to meet deadlines. As a junior editor, she was in conversation with Chinua Achebe and James Baldwin. With aplomb, poise, deft wit, and sometimes stern directness, she dealt with hot-headed authors, editors and publishers who repeatedly underestimated her instincts—not just as an editor but as a marketer with a deep insight into the wants of the reading public, both black and white. 'Editor' is an insufficient word to describe her work. She was a polymath and a custodian of black intellectual thought.

This is a terrific book, and I particularly loved the moments when I could read Toni Morrison's letters to authors. Her vision as an editor was broad. She thought at large about the market, about readers, about academic theory, and most of all, about black voices and history, but she was also a writer who got into the weeds of words, nitpicking a weak adjective or a narrative inconsistency or an overwritten passage. She could be pedantic and personable in equal measure, and disarmingly funny. There is a lot of astounding material in this book. The life of Gayl Jones seems bizarre and it was fascinating to read Morrison's almost parental care for this shy, and easily manipulated, author. I had no idea how close Morrison was with Angela Davis and I loved how defensive Morrison became about Davis' work, brushing aside other editors' concerns that Angela Davis was too political and didn't share anything about her personal life, "personal life" being a chauvinistic euphemism for "romantic life" (In one letter to a colleague, she said brusquely, "I must emphasize that there are no two Angela Davises. One political, one human. They are one and the same. She does not tuck her politics away. Never. Not in her dreams. Not in the bathtub. Not on the toilet. Not anywhere.") Her letters as an editor are often profoundly candid. When an editor was incensed to be left out of the acknowledgments of a book and accused Morrison of using the book to advance her own career, Morrison immediately apologized and corrected the record—but I love the personal note at the end, "Such a funny word. I don't have a career, you know. I just work."

"I just work" is a beautifully self-effacing understatement. Toni Morrison clearly dedicated so much of her life to cultivating black writers and curating a literary tradition. Her work and her waking life, her writing and her editing, all served the same purpose—to summon ghosts, to resurrect the voices that have been suppressed, whether by slavery or colonization, or even by the prejudices of the publishing industry—and this book is a monumental record of her labor. If, however, I have any criticism of the book, it would just be that I wish it gave more insight into Toni Morrison's professional life. We see the range of her projects and the varied difficulties she had charming authors, negotiating contracts, giving corrections, but I would have liked to have had some insight into her working relationships with other editors and what it was like to be at Random.