Morrison’s first novel wasn’t exactly a sensation upon its publication in 1970, but it forms the cornerstone of a stunning literary career and has gone on to sell nearly a million copies in the last half-century. The story of a young black girl who longs to have blue eyes, The Bluest Eye started life as a short story, which Morrison reworked and expanded into a novel — by getting up at 4 a.m. every day to write — while raising two children on her own and working full-time as an editor.

“Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies.” This line from Sula’s jacket copy gives some insight into why Morrison’s stories are often called modern-day Greek tragedies filled with domestic details. Sula is Morrison’s second novel and in its short 170-odd pages — which span 50-odd years — Morrison captures the vivacity of a young girls’ doomed friendship and the terrible loss of its eventual destruction.

Song of Solomon was the novel that made Morrison nearly a household name. Published in 1977, Morrison’s third novel received almost universal critical acclaim and was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1978. The book has also been challenged and banned in school districts in the United States, while also, apparently, being President Barack Obama’s favourite book.

The novel, which tells the life story of Macon “Milkman” Dead III — the first African-American baby born in the hospital in the fictional town of Mercy, Michigan — is harrowing and at times difficult reading, but ultimately exultant. It is rightly considered one of Morrison’s masterpieces, and is essential reading for, well, anyone.

Published originally in 1987, Beloved is considered Morrison’s masterpiece, with a New York Times survey of writers and literary critics naming it the best work of American fiction from 1981 to 2006. The novel was inspired by “A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child,” a newspaper article published in 1856, which was reproduced in The Black Book, a compilation of black history and culture, edited by Morrison in 1974. Morrison wondered what could possibly lead a mother to commit this crime and answered that question with this landmark novel about slavery.

Beloved was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and was critical to Morrison receiving her Nobel Prize. Getting in made into a movie was a 10-year labour of love for Oprah Winfrey, who knew it was meant to be on the big screen.

The second novel in Morrison’s Beloved trilogy (loosely modelled on Dante’s Divine Comedy), Jazz is set primarily in Harlem in the 1920s. First published in 1992, Jazz was the immediate precursor to Morrison receiving the Nobel Prize. Taking its stylistic approach from its title, Jazz is a musical novel, rooted in solos that come together to form a cohesive whole, shifting rhythms and motifs as the book coalesces.

Morrison intended for the three novels of the Beloved trilogy to be read together, as a sweeping historical examination of race and the legacy of slavery and disenfranchisement in America. “The conceptual connection is the search for the beloved – the part of the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you.” The trilogy concludes with Paradise, published in 1997.

Perhaps the most important book from Morrison in the last decade of her life, The Origin of Others, published in 2017, is a powerful and resonant examination of racism, fear of the other, the role of borders and the human need to belong. Based on her Norton Lectures, and rooted in an examination of racism, history and culture in the United States, The Origin of Others is a clarion call for understanding and for community, in the face of deeply entrenched violence and fear.

Morrison’s most recent book, published earlier this year, collects speeches, essays and occasional pieces from more than forty years of Morrison’s writing. It is a profound and galvanizing book, rooted in Morrison’s erudition and her profound moral clarity. The Source of Self-Regard is a rich sampler of Morrison’s thoughts, and what she deemed significant enough to preserve, including her Nobel Prize Lecture, which is a few pages of distilled, sharp power and insight.