Recommendations
Books Like The Bluest Eye
What to read after The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970) is one of the most devastating first novels in American literary history — Pecola Breedlove's wish for blue eyes and what the world has done to her to make her wish that. If you were drawn to its examination of internalized racism, its portrait of Black childhood in mid-century America, and Morrison's extraordinary prose, these novels offer the same quality of attention.
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winner — a former enslaved woman haunted by the ghost of the daughter she killed rather than return to slavery; the fullest realization of Morrison's literary project and widely considered one of the greatest American novels
- 2Buy
Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
A Black man in Michigan seeking his family history and his own identity — the same mythological treatment of Black American life as The Bluest Eye, with the same celebration of Black oral tradition and the same question of what it means to know where you come from
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Janie Crawford's search for love in rural Florida — Morrison has said Hurston was a central influence, and the two novels are the twin pillars of African American women's literary fiction; same celebration of Black interiority, same vernacular richness
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The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
Celie's letters to God from the American South — the same examination of Black women's lives under both racism and sexism, the same epistolary revelation of an interior life the world has tried to erase
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Passing
by Nella Larsen
A Black woman who can pass for white in Harlem in the 1920s — the same obsessive examination of what racial identity means and what it costs, the same compressed intensity, the same sense of a character shaped entirely by forces she cannot name
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Kindred
by Octavia Butler
A Black woman in 1976 California who is repeatedly pulled back in time to an antebellum plantation where she must protect the white man who is her ancestor — a science fiction novel that asks the same questions as Morrison about what slavery did to Black bodies and Black families, in a very different register
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Maya Angelou
Angelou's memoir of her childhood in the American South — the same evocation of what it is to be a Black girl in mid-century America, the same celebration of survival, the same unflinching account of what racism and sexual violence do to a young Black woman's sense of herself
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Sula
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's second novel — the friendship of two Black women in a small Ohio town from childhood through old age; the same Black community as The Bluest Eye, the same examination of what the community does to those who don't fit its expectations, with a more complex female friendship at its center
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