This book reads the oeuvre of Toni Morrison — fiction, non-fiction, and other — drawing extensively from her many interviews as well as her primary texts. The author places Morrison in several literary camps, one of them that of public intellectual; another, that of scion within the publishing world. Morrison began with novels that grew naturally from her own childhood in Lorain, Ohio — The Bluest Eye and Sula — but she quickly immersed herself in a myriad of African American lives and often little-known histories.