"Novel Promises: Toni Morrison and the Art of Fiction" with Autumn Womack

This talk seeks to complicate Toni Morrison’s relationship to the genre for which she is best known: the novel. Rather than approaching Morrison’s relationship to the novel as either an organic partnership, or one that was overdetermined by a long Black novelistic tradition, Dr. Womack will explore how Morrison confronted the promises and perils of the novel as she was emerging as a writer. Drawing largely upon archival research from the Toni Morrison Papers, and situating Morrison in the context of mid-century transformations in the novel and fiction writing, this talk will tell the story of how Morrison fell in love with the novel, and the various genres and modes that she flirted with along the way.

Autumn Womack is an Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University where she specializes in African American literary culture and theories of the archive. She is the author of The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930 (2022) and The Norton Library Edition of Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (2023). Her current book project, The Wanderer: Toni Morrison and the Art of Creativity (Knopf), is an archival biography of Toni Morrison’s creative process.