Reading Order
JazzToni Morrison Jazz Reading Order
Toni Morrison's Jazz (1992) is the second volume of what Morrison called her Beloved trilogy — Jazz follows Beloved (slavery) and precedes Paradise (the utopian community) — and its subject is the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The novel follows Joe Trace, a door-to-door cosmetics salesman who shoots his young lover Dorcas in 1926 Harlem, and his wife Violet, who disfigures Dorcas's body at her funeral. What makes Jazz extraordinary is its narrator: a self-aware, unreliable voice that is the city itself, which explicitly tells us it is re-imagining the story it tells.
Where to start
Beloved
Complete Jazz Book List
- 1Buy
Beloved
Toni Morrison·1987·The first novel of the Morrison trilogy — set in the aftermath of slavery in Cincinnati, 1873; read this first to understand the full arc from slavery to the Great Migration to the utopian community of Paradise. - 2Buy
Jazz
Toni Morrison·1992·The novel itself — the Harlem Renaissance, 1926; Joe and Violet Trace; Dorcas; the city of New York as a self-aware narrator. - 3Buy
Paradise
Toni Morrison·1997·The third volume of the trilogy — an all-Black Oklahoma town in 1976, organized around an attack on a convent of women outside the town; the most experimental and difficult of the three. - 4Buy
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
James Weldon Johnson·1912·The essential companion in the Harlem Renaissance tradition — the anonymous narrator's passage between the Black and white worlds of early twentieth-century America; one of the founding texts of the literary culture Jazz depicts. - 5Buy
Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America
Various·1987·The standard visual companion to the period Jazz depicts — the paintings and sculpture of the Harlem Renaissance that gives visual context to Morrison's literary evocation. - 6Buy
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison·1952·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 essential companion in the Black Harlem novel tradition — the period after Jazz, but the same community. - 7Buy
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston·1937·Hurston's novel was published at the height of the Harlem Renaissance that Jazz depicts — Janie Crawford's story of self-discovery in rural Florida; the essential Harlem Renaissance fiction companion to Jazz.
Jazz — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Toni Morrison's Jazz about?
Jazz is set in 1926 Harlem during the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance. Joe Trace, a door-to-door cosmetics salesman, shoots his young lover Dorcas; his wife Violet disfigures Dorcas's body at her funeral. The novel is narrated by a self-aware voice — the city of New York itself — that explicitly re-imagines the story it tells.
Do I need to read Beloved before Jazz?
You do not need to read Beloved first — Jazz stands completely alone. But reading Beloved first gives you the full arc of Morrison's trilogy: slavery (Beloved), the Great Migration (Jazz), and the utopian community (Paradise). The trilogy is one of the greatest achievements in American fiction when read in order.
Is Jazz Morrison's most experimental novel?
Jazz is Morrison's most formally innovative novel in terms of its narrator — the self-aware city-voice that admits it has been wrong and re-tells the story. Paradise is more mythologically complex. Beloved has its ghost and its fragmented time structure. All three are experimental but in different ways.
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