For me, it was “Song of Solomon," back in 197 7. From its first words (“The fathers may soar / And the children may know their names”), the story of Milkman Dead and Guitar had me in thrall. Later, in 1992 , I interviewed her for British television when she had just published “Jazz.” In that program Cornel West put her on the level of Melville and Faulkner. A. S. Byatt called her the equal of Dostoevsky, George Eliot and Thomas Mann . She spoke to me about jazz as a metaphor for black lives, their improvisational nature, their brilliance and the hard work that took. And perhaps this is a thing to say about her today as we grieve: that as well as Faulkner and Dostoevsky, she was also the peer of Ella and Miles.

Harold Bloom

Literary Critic

I met Ms. Morrison about a half-century ago and have talked with her on and off through the years. She had a comic serenity that sustained her in a long career as novelist and as public person. I prefer her earlier novels — “The Bluest Eye,” “Sula,” and above all “Song of Solomon” — to her later achievements from “Beloved” onwards. Ms. Morrison began as a disciple both of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. She absorbed them splendidly in “Song of Solomon,” which seems likely to be a permanent work.

Angela Flournoy

Author

Much like the natural miracle of trees hewing themselves together into a sort of shelter, Toni Morrison’s commitment to the interior lives and concerns of black women was at once perfectly natural and an uncommon opportunity for reflection for those who needed to read her most. When I heard of Morrison’s passing I wept, then I thought about trees. In Morrison’s masterwork, “Beloved,” the character Denver is the lone living child in a house heavy with the spirit of her murdered sister and the recent, lingering trauma of slavery. She often goes to the woods near her home to think, and to secret her treasures away in a room-like enclosure made by a tangle of boxwood trees. The image of this green room, this quiet space, this “ emerald closet ,” is one of many gifted to the reader throughout “Beloved,” a slim book brimming with singular, poetic language. It is the image that has always felt most apt to describe what Morrison’s words have provided to me, and to millions of black women like me. Her prose is a respite, an opportunity to be still and known and astonished all at once.

John Irving

Author

I have fond memories of Toni. She was a sympathetic soul to younger writers, myself included. We taught at Bread Loaf , where we had sons the same age; my Colin and her Slade hung out together. But Toni has most affected me as a writer because of what I’ve learned from her writing. I reviewed “Tar Baby,” her 4th novel, in these pages . I compared her to Hardy and Dickens, citing their ambitious novels, their willingness to elevate their characters to the level of myth. Dickens conveyed his ambitions in his titles — “Bleak House,” “Great Expectations,” “Hard Times.” Hardy was maligned for his intrusive instructions to mankind; he didn’t worry about interrupting his narrative. Toni Morrison routinely took these risks; she had fun with such mischief. She began “Song of Solomon” with a life insurance agent leaping off a hospital roof in an attempt to fly to the other side of Lake Superior. In “Sula,” the main character is such an upsetting heroine that her return to a town in a poor black part of Ohio is “ accompanied by a plague of robins .” In “Tar Baby,” she gave us a candy manufacturer who marries a woman he sees riding a carnival float holding the paw of a polar bear. Toni Morrison wasn’t timid about dramatic exaggeration, but her enduring interest — as I wrote almost 40 years ago — was “in demonstrating the vast discrepancies between the places black people end up and the places they seek.” Toni was very much a social realist, too. I concluded my review with this sentence: “Thomas Hardy, full of his own instructions to damaged mankind , would have loved this book.” What I should have said was that Hardy would have loved this writer.

Carmen Maria Machado

Author

I’ve loved Toni Morrison ever since I read “Sula” and “The Bluest Eye” in college, but “Beloved” was a game changer for me. “Beloved” makes you feel like everything you’ve ever written is dull and lifeless by comparison. The level of craft, the flawlessness and beauty of the sentences, the scope of the imagination, the marshaling of language around unspeakable pain. It’s so good. And it’s our most American horror story; not just a great haunted house novel (though it is that), but a novel about how our country is a haunted house, and how we ignore the ghosts at our own moral peril. I know Toni Morrison wasn’t writing for me, but she shaped me anyway, and I am so grateful for that.

Daniel Alarcón

Author

Almost 20 years ago, I was just out of college, walking into a public high school in central Harlem as a woefully underprepared 10th grade English teacher. I remember my principal directing me to a storage closet and instructing me to teach whatever book had the most copies. I sifted through a bunch of dusty, out-of-print monstrosities, my despair mounting, until I found a stack of Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” and rejoiced. Imagine writing one novel as perfect as that. In her staggering career, Toni Morrison did it several times. The way my students came to life in the company of that text is something I will always remember.

[ Read The Times’s obituary of Toni Morrison. ]

Brent Staples

Editorial Writer, The New York Times

I was a brand-new assistant editor at The Times Book Review in the spring of 1985 when the head editor gave me the typescript of a review that was scheduled to run soon, saying, “Please edit this.” My first, panicked thought when I encountered “by Toni Morrison” on the first page was that this had been a mistake. How could I — a novice editor, smitten years earlier by the novels “Sula” and “Song of Solomon’’ — lay hands on the prose of a literary hero? She disagreed with a few of the changes I suggested. After we had discussed it at some length over the phone, she said with finality, in that irresistibly rich voice: “You have proved to them that you can edit me down. Now let me up.”