Sula was published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, on 7 January 1974 (copyright 1973), in a first printing of approximately 10,000 copies priced at $5.95. Morrison’s second novel was a critical success — nominated for the National Book Award — and established her as a major literary voice. The novel is concentrated, lyrical, and ruthless: barely 175 pages, but containing multitudes. It spans the years 1919 to 1965, following two women and the Black community they inhabit and define.
The Novel
Sula traces the friendship between Nel Wright and Sula Peace from childhood in the 1920s through their divergence and rupture in the 1930s and 1940s, set in the Bottom — a Black neighbourhood in the fictional town of Medallion, Ohio. Nel is conventional, dutiful, domestic: she marries, raises children, and embodies community respectability. Sula is transgressive, autonomous, fearless: she leaves Medallion for ten years, takes lovers indiscriminately (including Nel’s husband), and refuses every social expectation placed on Black women.
The novel refuses to moralise. Sula is not punished for her transgressions in any conventional sense — she dies young, but on her own terms, defiant to the last. Nel is not rewarded for her conformity — she discovers, decades later, that her grief was for Sula, not for the husband Sula stole. The community needs Sula as its designated evil — her presence gives them something to define themselves against — and her absence leaves them purposeless.
Morrison’s prose here is at its most compressed and devastating. Images recur with the force of myth: the birthmark over Sula’s eye (variously read as a rose, a snake, ashes), the fire that kills Sula’s mother Hannah, the river where the two girls accidentally drown a boy, the tunnel collapse that kills the Bottom’s men. Every detail carries symbolic weight without ever feeling merely symbolic.
Themes
Sula asks what happens when a Black woman refuses the roles assigned to her — refuses motherhood, domesticity, sexual propriety, community obligation. The answer is that she becomes a pariah, a scapegoat, and paradoxically, a liberating force. Sula’s freedom is both magnificent and destructive; Nel’s conformity is both loving and diminishing. Morrison refuses to choose between them.
The novel is also a portrait of a community across five decades — its rituals, its hierarchies, its collective life and death. The Bottom (ironically situated on a hilltop) is as richly realised as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, and its destruction by urban renewal in the novel’s final pages is a quiet catastrophe.
Collecting Sula
First edition (1974, Alfred A. Knopf): Approximately 10,000 copies, priced at $5.95.
Identification points:
- “First Edition” on the copyright page
- Number line ending in “2” (Knopf’s practice)
- Borzoi colophon on the title page
First edition, first printing:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $1,500–$4,000
- Near Fine in jacket: $600–$1,500
- Without jacket: $75–$200
Signed copies: $2,000–$6,000. Less commonly signed than Beloved or Song of Solomon because Morrison signed less frequently in the early 1970s.
Value trajectory (2016–2026): Approximately 2× for fine copies in jacket. Growing critical recognition of the novel (many scholars now consider it Morrison’s most formally perfect work) and Morrison’s death have driven appreciation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Sula a villain? Morrison explicitly rejected this reading. Sula is amoral rather than immoral — she lives according to her own code without reference to community standards. Whether that constitutes evil depends on one’s framework.
What is the significance of the Bottom? A Black community built on land a white farmer gave to a freed slave as a cruel joke (claiming the hilltop was the “bottom of heaven”). The name encodes the history of racial deception and exploitation.