Jazz Study Guide

Toni Morrison grew up in Northeast Ohio, where her ostensibly integrated small town was in fact deeply inflected by racial prejudice and violence. After attending college at Howard University (America’s oldest historically Black university), Morrison got an M.A. from Cornell, where she studied modernist writers like William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. Post-college, Morrison spent several years teaching at universities and working in publishing at Random House while writing her first novel, The Bluest Eye. The Bluest Eye received minimal attention upon its initial release (though it has since been recognized as a classic). Morrison then followed her debut up with Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved (1987), the novel that made her a literary celebrity and a household name. In 1993, one year after she published Jazz, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the latter part of her life, Morrison continued to write, spend time with her sons Harold and Slade, and teach at Princeton University, before she passed away in 2019 at the age of 88. She is considered a literary icon and an important voice on issues of racial and gender justice.

Jazz takes place in the epicenter of the Harlem Renaissance, an explosion of Black music, theater, art, literature, and theory in the 1920s and early 1930s. This period is sometimes known as the Jazz Age, as it was the moment in which jazz—which had its roots in the New Orleans Black community—gained wider popularity across the United States. But while the characters of Jazz exist in this flourishing cultural milieu, they are also haunted by darker events in American history. In 1914, just 11 years before the novel begins, the U.S. had fought in the devastatingly violent World War I. Upon returning home, many Black veterans found they were still not accorded respect despite the service they had done for their country. Then, in 1917, the East St. Louis massacre broke out, one of the deadliest episodes of anti-Black white violence in the nation’s history. The massacre spurred many protests, including the NAACP Silent Protest Parade that Alice Manfred watches in the novel, though it was largely ignored by the mainstream media.

Morrison had long been interested in modernist classics like William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom and Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. But Jazz, first inspired by an image Morrison saw in James Van Der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead, specifically drew on several works from the Harlem Renaissance era of art and music it was depicting. Morrison was likely influenced thematically by Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, and she may have taken some of the rhythmic, almost poetic prose of Jazz from works like Sterling A. Brown’s Southern Road. Perhaps most importantly, Jazz is also intimately related to two of Morrison’s other novels, Beloved and Paradise. Taken together, Morrison intended the three to form a trilogy about love and African-American history (with Beloved focusing on the years right after the Civil War, Jazz focusing on the Jazz Age of the 1920s, and Paradise taking place in the mid-1970s).