An official Oprah Winfrey's "The Books That Help Me Through" selection

With this brilliantly imagined New York Times bestselling novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. 

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world.

BIO

Toni Morrison is the author of eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.

REVIEWS

"A rich, full novel. . . . It lifts us up [and] impresses itself upon us like a love affair." -- The New York Times Book Review

"Exuberant. . . . An artistic vision that encompasses both a private and national heritage."

"Stunningly beautiful. . . . Full of magnificent people. . . . They are still haunting my house. I suspect they will be with me forever." --Anne Tyler, The Washington Post

"If Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man went underground, Toni Morrison's Milkman flies." --John Leonard, The New York Times Book Review

[H] Everyman's Library  /  November 14, 1995

1.06" H x 8.32" L x 5.32" W (1.12 lbs) 384 pages

[P] Vintage  /  June 08, 2004

0.72" H x 8.05" L x 5.28" W (0.77 lbs) 352 pages