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Cover of Tar Baby by Toni Morrison

Tar Baby

  • 305 pages · about 5 hours
  • First published 1981
  • 47 editions

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1 About this book

Ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary, Tar Baby is Toni Morrison's reinvention of the love story. Jadine Childs is a black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins.

Son is a black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.

  • Race relations
  • Family life
  • Caribbean area
  • Crime
  • Romance
  • Race identity
  • Married people
  • Afro-Americans

2 About Toni Morrison

1931–2019

Chloe Anthony Wofford "Toni" Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019) was an American novelist and editor. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987).

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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