Reading Order
Jazz Reading Order
Jazz (1992) by Toni Morrison is her sixth novel — set in Harlem in 1926 during the height of the Jazz Age and the Great Migration, and structured to move like the music that gives it its name. A man named Joe Trace, a door-to-door cosmetics salesman who has come north from Virginia, shoots and kills his young lover Dorcas at a party. His wife Violet slashes the face of the girl's corpse at the funeral. The novel circles this violence from multiple angles and across time, told by a narrator who reveals herself slowly and who, like jazz itself, improvises around a theme rather than moving forward in a straight line. Jazz is one of Morrison's most formally ambitious novels and one of her most exhilarating — the prose has the rhythm and spontaneity of jazz improvisation, and the structure mimics the call-and-response and variation-on-a-theme of the music. The novel's engagement with the Great Migration and Harlem in the 1920s gives it the energy of a specific historical moment, and Morrison's portrait of the neighborhood — its beauty, its promise, its danger — is one of the great evocations of a place in American fiction. Jazz was intended as the second part of a trilogy that began with Beloved (1987) and concluded with Paradise (1997), all three exploring different aspects of African American history and experience.
Where to start
Jazz — any Knopf or Vintage paperback. The novel stands completely alone but is enriched by reading Beloved (1987) first, which explores the slavery era, and Paradise (1997) after, which completes the trilogy.
Complete Jazz Book List
- 1Buy
Jazz
Toni Morrison·1992·The novel — Harlem 1926; Joe Trace's murder of his young lover Dorcas and his wife Violet's attack on the corpse at the funeral; the Jazz Age Great Migration novel told in prose that moves like the music itself; the second of the trilogy. - 2Buy
Beloved
Toni Morrison·1987·Morrison's Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — Sethe's slavery past, Beloved's ghost, and the cost of escape; the first of the trilogy and Morrison's defining work; the essential context for Jazz's portrait of what the Great Migration meant to people who had survived that history. - 3Buy
Paradise
Toni Morrison·1997·The third part of the trilogy — the all-Black town of Ruby, Oklahoma, founded by former slaves after Reconstruction; the attack on the Convent; the completing work of the Morrison trilogy that begins with Beloved and continues with Jazz. - 4Buy
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison·1977·Morrison's breakthrough novel — Milkman Dead's search for his family's history in the South; the companion in her fiction about African American men and the ancestral past; the National Book Critics Circle Award winner. - 5Buy
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison·1952·Ellison's National Book Award-winning novel — the companion in African American fiction about identity, invisibility, and the experience of Black men in mid-20th-century America; the Harlem scenes are the companion to Jazz's Harlem portrait. - 6Buy
The Street
Ann Petry·1946·Petry's novel about Lutie Johnson in Harlem — the companion in African American literary fiction about Black women navigating Harlem in the 1940s; the social realism of The Street is a different mode from Jazz's formal lyricism but both portray Harlem with deep knowledge. - 7Buy
Passing
Nella Larsen·1929·Larsen's Harlem Renaissance novel — the companion in African American fiction set in the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance; the formal precision of Passing is the companion to Jazz's formal ambition in the same historical period. - 8Buy
Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow·1975·Doctorow's novel — the companion in American fiction about the early 20th century that uses historical figures and the energy of popular culture (ragtime, jazz) as structural principles; Doctorow's American panorama is the companion white American perspective on the same era Jazz portrays from inside the Black community.
Jazz — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Jazz by Toni Morrison about?
Jazz is set in Harlem in 1926, during the Jazz Age and the height of the Great Migration. Joe Trace, a fifty-year-old door-to-door cosmetics salesman from rural Virginia, is having an affair with an eighteen-year-old girl named Dorcas. He shoots her at a party; she refuses to name him as her killer and bleeds to death. His wife Violet, learning of the affair, goes to Dorcas's funeral and slashes her face with a knife. The novel circles this violence across time: backward into Joe and Violet's lives in Virginia and their move north, and forward as Violet becomes obsessed with learning who Dorcas was. The narrative is told by a mysterious, unreliable narrator who is herself a kind of city consciousness, and the novel is structured to move like jazz — improvising, repeating, varying on a theme.
Why is Jazz structured to move like music?
Jazz is structured like jazz music — with call and response, improvisation, repetition with variation, and a theme that is stated and then elaborated rather than a plot that moves forward in a straight line. The narrator announces near the beginning that she knows what Joe and Violet are going to do, then revisits that knowledge repeatedly from different angles, adding context and complicating the simple story of violence and grief. Morrison has said that she wanted the reading experience to enact what listening to jazz enacts: the sense that you know the theme but cannot predict where the improvisation will take you. The structure is one of the most ambitious formal experiments in Morrison's fiction and in American literary fiction of the 1990s.
What is the Great Migration's role in Jazz?
The Great Migration — the movement of millions of African Americans from the rural South to Northern cities between roughly 1910 and 1970 — is the historical foundation of Jazz. Joe and Violet Trace are part of the Great Migration, coming north from Virginia to Harlem, and their story is the story of millions: the promise of freedom and economic opportunity in the North, the actual conditions of Harlem in the 1920s, the relationship between the urban present and the rural Southern past, and the way the past continues to shape people who have physically left it behind. The Harlem that Morrison portrays — its beauty, its energy, its music, and its violence — is inseparable from its identity as the destination of the Great Migration.
How does Jazz relate to the Morrison trilogy?
Morrison intended Jazz as the second part of a trilogy about African American experience across three historical eras. Beloved (1987) is set in the 1860s and 1870s, in the immediate aftermath of slavery; Jazz (1992) is set in the 1920s, during the Great Migration and the Jazz Age; Paradise (1997) is set in the 1970s, in an all-Black Oklahoma town founded by former slaves. All three novels deal with the traumatic history of African Americans and its continuing effects; all three center on women and on acts of violence; all three are formally ambitious in ways that reflect their historical moments. They can be read in any order, but the sequence provides a kind of panorama of African American history from emancipation to the civil rights era.
What should I read after Jazz by Toni Morrison?
After Jazz, Beloved (1987) is the first novel of the trilogy and Morrison's most celebrated work. Paradise (1997) is the third novel of the trilogy, completing the panorama. Song of Solomon (1977) and Sula (1973) are Morrison's other major novels from her earlier period. For African American fiction set in Harlem in the same era, Nella Larsen's Passing and Ann Petry's The Street are important companions.
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