Song of Solomon

Song of Solomon is a novel by the American writer Toni Morrison, published in 1977. It was her third novel, and it won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Macon Dead III is known as Milkman for most of the book, a nickname he acquires in childhood. He grows up in the town of Southside in Michigan in a household defined by his father's obsession with property and respectability and by his mother's unhappiness, and he spends his twenties drifting, involved with a woman named Hagar and increasingly at odds with his family. His aunt Pilate, who lives on the edge of the town with her daughter and granddaughter and a sack of bones, holds the history that the rest of the family has abandoned, and Milkman's search for the gold his father believes is hidden in a cave turns into a search for the ancestors the family left behind. The flight of Robert Smith at the opening, and the family legend of a man who could fly, run through everything that follows.

Morrison wrote the novel while the civil rights movement's aftermath was still working through American life, and her book uses the traditions of folklore and scripture to give a family saga the scale of a myth.