In that same interview, Morrison commented on the difficulty of some of her later novels, with their nonlinear structures and dense, superheated language. About people who ask her why she doesn’t write books that everyone can understand, she said: “I don’t think they mean that. I think they mean, Are you ever going to write a book about white people?” She added: “I’m going to stay out here on the margin, and let the center look for me.”

The center found her. Morrison was that rare critical and commercial success, even before Oprah Winfrey became her steady champion. “Song of Solomon” was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1977, the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright’s “Native Son” in 1940.

In addition to the Nobel, Morrison won a Pulitzer Prize (for “Beloved”) and the National Book Critics Circle Award (for “Song of Solomon”). A 2006 New York Times Book Review poll of 124 prominent authors, critics and editors named “Beloved” as the single best work of American fiction published in the previous 25 years.

As a novelist, Morrison understood that some wounds must be reopened in order to heal. She understood better than most the suppurating sores beneath the skin of American life. She also comprehended, in a subcutaneous manner, something that Iris Murdoch put this way: Being nice is not the same as being good.

A great deal of humor floats to the surface in Morrison’s work. (“Laughter,” she remarked, “is a way of taking the reins into your own hands.”) Even more often, she wrote about loneliness. Many of the scenes in her best novels reverberate with desolation. “Pain,” she wrote in her novel “Jazz” (1992). “I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweet tooth for it.”

At the heart of “Beloved” is as indelible a scene as we have had in this country’s literature in the last 50 years. A runaway slave, about to be caught, cuts the throat of her baby daughter with a handsaw rather than have her returned to subjugation.

Morrison was a sensuous, first-rate writer about many things, not only about race. Her novel “Tar Baby” (1981) is about a love affair between African-Americans from separate worlds — Jadine graduated from the Sorbonne and is a fashion model, while Son is impoverished. But it also contains writing like this, about the natural world:

“Bees have no sting on Isle des Chevaliers, nor honey. They are fat and lazy, curious about nothing. Especially at noon. At noon parrots sleep and diamondbacks work down the trees toward the cooler undergrowth. At noon the water in the mouths of orchids left there by the breakfast rain is warm. Children stick their fingers in them and scream as though scalded.”