Reading Order
Sula Reading Order
Sula (1973) by Toni Morrison is her second novel and the one in which she found her characteristic voice — a novel about the friendship between two Black women in the small Ohio town of Medallion's Bottom, following Nel Wright and Sula Peace from their girlhood in the 1920s through adulthood to Nel's old age in the 1960s. Sula is the first major novel to make a Black woman's inner life and friendship with another Black woman the central subject of American fiction — not as background or support for a story about men, but as the primary concern. The novel is formally unusual in Morrison's oeuvre: tightly structured (only about 174 pages), almost Greek in its compression, with a clear tragic arc and a strong sense of communal chorus — the Bottom observes, gossips, judges, and preserves the memory of what happened. Sula Peace is Morrison's most radical character: a woman who refuses the roles available to Black women in mid-century America (wife, mother, church member), who treats her life as an experiment in feeling, and who returns to the Bottom after ten years in the wider world to live outside the community's norms in a way that both threatens and energizes it. Nel Wright is the community's embodiment — the woman who chose marriage, home, and respectability — and her friendship with Sula is the novel's emotional core, the relationship that makes both women possible and that outlasts everything that separates them.
Where to start
Sula — any Vintage International edition. The novel is very short and can be read in an afternoon; its compression is its formal achievement, and the final pages earn every one of their words.
Complete Sula Book List
- 1Buy
Sula
Toni Morrison·1973·The novel — Nel and Sula in the Bottom of Medallion, Ohio; female friendship as the primary human relationship in American fiction. - 2Buy
Beloved
Toni Morrison·1987·Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the slavery trauma that Sula's Ohio community is only one generation away from; the essential companion in Morrison's project. - 3Buy
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison·1977·Morrison's National Book Critics Circle-winning novel — the companion in its anatomy of African-American community and the question of what inheritance means. - 4Buy
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison·1970·Morrison's debut — the predecessor to Sula in its centering of Black girls' inner lives in an Ohio town; the less successful but essential first expression of what Sula achieves. - 5Buy
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston·1937·Hurston's Harlem Renaissance novel — the predecessor in centering a Black woman's desire and self-knowledge; Janie's community is the formal counterpart to the Bottom in Sula. - 6Buy
The Color Purple
Alice Walker·1982·Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the companion in African-American women's fiction; where Sula is compressed and communal, The Color Purple is expansive and epistolary. - 7Buy
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson·1980·Robinson's debut — two sisters and the question of domestic stability vs. transience; the white American literary parallel to Sula's account of two women and what each chooses. - 8Buy
Passing
Nella Larsen·1929·Larsen's Harlem Renaissance novel — female friendship and the racial boundary in 1920s New York; the formal predecessor in African-American women's fiction of intense female relationships.
Sula — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Sula about?
Sula follows the friendship between Nel Wright and Sula Peace in the Bottom — a Black neighborhood in the hills above the white town of Medallion, Ohio — from the 1920s to the 1960s. Nel and Sula are childhood friends who together witness and partly cause the drowning death of Chicken Little, a small boy; the shared secret binds them. Nel marries Jude Greene and becomes a respectable member of the community; Sula leaves Medallion and spends ten years in the wider world. When Sula returns in 1937, she scandalizes the community by sleeping with Nel's husband Jude and continuing a series of affairs with any man she chooses. Nel and Sula's friendship fractures; Sula becomes the Bottom's designated evil, the focus of the community's moral energy (when Sula is there to be evil, the community is virtuous). When Sula dies in 1940, the community loses its organizing principle and begins to disintegrate.
What is Sula's character and why is she so important in American fiction?
Sula Peace is Morrison's most radical character — a woman who refuses every role available to Black women in mid-century America: wife, mother, church member, community servant. She treats her life as 'an experimental life,' in Morrison's phrase — as material for feeling, for experience, for knowing. She has no interest in the future, no investment in continuity or care, no loyalty to the community's norms. What makes her important is that Morrison takes her refusal seriously: where the community (and Nel) see Sula's freedom as evil, Morrison presents it as a legitimate — if costly — mode of being. Sula's question — 'Was this the bottom of her life?' — is the novel's central question, and Morrison refuses to answer it by condemning Sula. Sula is the character who makes the question of what a woman's life is for unavoidable.
What is the Bottom and what does it represent?
The Bottom is the Black neighborhood in the hills above Medallion, Ohio — a neighborhood created by a piece of white folklore: a white man promised a freed slave 'the bottom of heaven' as payment for work, and gave him the hillside land because, he said, heaven's bottom looks down, so the hills are the bottom of heaven. The Bottom is Morrison's compressed version of what Ralph Ellison calls the 'black belt' and what Toni Cade Bambara calls the Black community in its full social complexity. The Bottom has its gossip networks, its church, its prostitutes (the Three Deweys), its community memory (Ajax's history), its relationship to the white town below it. Morrison uses the Bottom as a chorus in the Greek-tragedy sense: the community observes, judges, preserves, and eventually is destroyed — the Bottom is torn down for a golf course by the end of the novel.
How does Sula compare to Morrison's other novels?
Sula is Morrison's tightest and most formally controlled novel — more compressed than Beloved, more symmetrical than Song of Solomon, less historically sprawling than Jazz or Paradise. Its Greek tragic structure (hubris, nemesis, catharsis) is more visible than in any of her other books, and its communal chorus is more consistent. The Bluest Eye (1970) is its predecessor in centering a Black girl's inner life in an Ohio town, but Sula achieves what The Bluest Eye approaches: a fully realized account of Black women's interior life in which the community is not background but the medium through which individual psychology is expressed and constrained. The novel is probably the best entry point to Morrison's fiction for a reader new to her work.
What should I read after Sula?
After Sula, Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Song of Solomon (1977) are the natural next steps — both continue the exploration of African-American community and ancestry. The Bluest Eye (1970) is the predecessor. For the African-American women's literary tradition, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Alice Walker's The Color Purple are the most important companions. For the Greek tragic mode in American fiction, Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark (1968) and Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away (1960) are stylistically very different but formally comparable. For Morrison scholarship, Danille Taylor-Guthrie's Conversations with Toni Morrison (1994) is the best starting point.
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