A portion of the statement of responsibility was taken from the front cover.
"Originally published in slightly different form in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1977"--Title page verso.
Summary
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.
