Maps and Data
| Title | Year | Length (in words) | Unique words | Vocabulary density | Words per sentence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Bluest Eye | 1970 | 54,128 | 6768 | 0.125 | 11.8 |
| Sula | 1973 | 49,136 | 6150 | 0.125 | 16.2 |
| Song of Solomon | 1977 | 117,130 | 8843 | 0.075 | 11.6 |
| Tar Baby | 1981 | 104087 | 8706 | 0.084 | 11.5 |
| Beloved | 1987 | 100,392 | 7232 | 0.072 | 12.8 |
| Jazz | 1992 | 69,092 | 7023 | 0.102 | 15 |
| Paradise | 1997 | 111,012 | 10,589 | 0.095 | 12.5 |
| Love | 2003 | 61021 | 7784 | 0.128 | 12.8 |
| A Mercy | 2008 | 45413 | 6471 | 0.142 | 13.2 |
| Home | 2012 | 32317 | 5368 | 0.163 | 12.2 |
| God Help the Child | 2015 | 40048 | 6203 | 0.155 | 12.7 |
Toni Morrison's longest novel -- Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison's most difficult novel -- Paradise (based on number of unique words)
Toni Morrison's shortest novel -- Home
It's often been said that something changed in Morrison's fiction after Paradise -- and this table generally supports that. All novels following Paradise were shorter -- 60,000 words or less, and had fewer unique words. In comparison to her earlier works, Morrison's last three novels seem especially short and tend to feature vocabulary with fewer than 7000 unique words. That said, other measures of stylistic complexity, including words per sentence, suggest a high degree of stylistic consistency throughout Morrison's career.
As this site develops, the plan is to collect and process more data related to Toni Morrison's writing, including:
- Interactive maps (using Storymaps in Voyant-Tools) that explore locations in Morrison's fiction and identify geographical patterns that might be interesting to scholars and researchers
- More data related to Morrison's fiction, including materials that might be of interest to digital humanities scholars.
- A comparison of Morrison's language and vocabular to that of earlier Black writers, particularly with respect to her references to race and racism in American life