Commercial book publishing was (and is) unbearably white. In 1971, when Toni Morrison became a trade editor, about 95 percent of the fiction published by the big commercial houses was by white authors. By 2018, that number dropped only to 89 percent. One of the only other black women working as an editor, Marie Brown, started the same year at Doubleday. Black women faced bias along axes of race and gender, making Morrison's extraordinary accomplishments all the more astonishing. She began her career in publishing as a textbook editor for L. W. Singer in Syracuse, a Random House subsidiary. On a visit a couple years later, Bob Bernstein-observing that "African Americans were not just underrepresented in the business; they were practically nonexistent"-promoted Morrison first to the scholastic division then to trade editor for Random House at the New York City headquarters.
Why Toni Morrison Left Publishing ‹ Literary Hub
23 October 2023
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