Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled
himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of
his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly
imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as
audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she
follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s
origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and
seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized
black world.
