“Editing sometimes requires restricting, setting loose or nailing down,” said Morrison in what was perhaps the closest she came to a definition of her craft.

Most people know Toni Morrison, who died six years ago at the age of 88, as a writer. With formidable and elegant prose, tackling themes of racism, feminism and slavery, she won countless readers and the Nobel Prize in Literature. But the Swedish Academy’s praise in 1993 for Morrison’s project to “give life to an essential aspect of American reality” could equally apply to her work as an editor, as Dana A. Williams illustrates. Before she moved to writing full-time, Morrison helped to bring books by other authors to fruition with Random House between 1971 and 1983. Despite the play on words in its title, Toni at Random attests that her approach to “creating a space where creativity could be nurtured and flourish” was anything but haphazard.

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