Recommendations
Books Like Jazz
Best books to read after Jazz by Toni Morrison
Jazz is Morrison at her most formally innovative — the self-aware narrator who is the city of New York itself, the Harlem Renaissance of 1926 as a backdrop for love, murder, and grief. If the novel's formal experiment and its portrait of the Great Migration community moved you, these books share its immersion in the Black cultural life of early twentieth-century America, its formal self-consciousness, and its conviction that how a story is told is inseparable from what the story means.
- 1Buy
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
The first volume of Morrison's trilogy — set in 1873 Cincinnati in the aftermath of slavery; the historical foundation that Jazz builds upon; one of the greatest American novels and the essential context for understanding what Morrison is doing when she brings us from slavery to the Great Migration to Harlem
- 2Buy
Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston's 1937 novel was published at the height of the Harlem Renaissance that Jazz depicts — the essential companion from within the period; Hurston was a central figure in the cultural world Morrison evokes, and Janie Crawford's story of self-discovery through language parallels Jazz's exploration of what the city of New York makes possible for Black Americans
- 3Buy
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
by James Weldon Johnson
Johnson's 1912 novel about a biracial man who chooses to pass as white is one of the founding texts of the literary culture Jazz depicts — the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance were in part responses to the world Johnson's narrator inhabits; the essential predecessor in the Black American novel tradition on the question of identity and community
- 4Buy
Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
Ellison's National Book Award-winning novel about a nameless Black man's journey from the Deep South to Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s is the most important American novel about the Harlem community in the decade after Jazz's setting; the companion that shows what the world Jazz depicts became in the next generation
- 5Buy
Sula
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's most formally daring early novel — the companion in her Yoknapatawpha of the imagination (the Bottom, Ohio) to Jazz's Harlem; reading them together shows the range of Morrison's formal experiments and her consistent interest in how Black communities sustain and destroy their most transgressive members
- 6Buy
Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's National Book Award-winning novel — the most accessible entry point into her major work and the one that provides the historical depth (the family's migration from South to North) that Jazz takes for granted; essential reading in the Morrison sequence
- 7Buy
Giovanni's Room
by James Baldwin
Baldwin's 1956 novel about an American man in Paris who must choose between his lover Giovanni and a conventional American life — the most direct companion to Jazz in its portrait of the city (Paris for Baldwin, New York for Morrison) as a place that makes possible ways of living that the American South forecloses
- 8Buy
The Souls of Black Folk
by W.E.B. Du Bois
Du Bois's 1903 collection of essays — coining the concept of 'double-consciousness' and describing the spiritual strivings of Black Americans — is the non-fiction foundation for the world Jazz depicts; the most important intellectual companion to understanding what the Great Migration meant to the people who made it
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