The protagonist of Beloved (1987) was inspired by Margaret Garner-a historical figure Morrison encountered in her research for The Black Book (1974), a collection on Black life in America through the centuries. Oftentimes her questions were sparked by flares from the historical archive that left afterimages that just wouldn’t let her go. What, she wondered, were the consequences of “a woman’s escape from male rule on not only a conventional black society, but on female friendship”? Her second novel, Sula (1973), grew out of her interest in “outlaw women,” an interest that would persist through decades.

The Bluest Eye (1970), her debut novel, was precipitated by a question that came to haunt her while she worked her day job as an editor at Random House: what were the “tragic and disabling consequences of accepting rejection as legitimate, as self-evident?” The answer took shape in Pecola, one of the most miserable, abject young girls to exist in English-language literature the book would launch Morrison’s multi-decade career as the United States’ preeminent novelist and writer. In her forewords, she lets readers in on what these questions are. “I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don’t have any answers to,” Toni Morrison told The Paris Review in 1993. Her forewords offer to demystify the creation of these worlds. For me, navigating Morrison’s fictional worlds-awash with smells, colors, textures, flowers, and foliage-is much like traveling to a new city or country where my own feeling of foreignness is palpable. My specific attraction to her forewords, I suspect, emanates from the contrast they draw with her novels, which construct imaginative universes so whole and total in their details, signs, and inhabitants that I frequently find them overwhelming. Recently, in preparing to visit an exhibition of Toni Morrison’s process papers, “Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory,” on view at Princeton University Library, I became fascinated with Morrison’s forewords to her novels-succinct yet highly technical exegeses of her creative muses, opening sentences, archival practices, and historical and psychological preoccupations.

HOWEVER UNLIKELY a place to begin one’s critical investigations, I have always read the forewords of novels eagerly, with a hope that the writer will let slip crucial details about their sources of inspiration and creative process.

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