LARB: ‘Playing in the Dark’ at 25
Joseph Darda re-examines the celebrated Toni Morrison book and its reflections on the whiteness of American literature
On November 9, 1987, at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan, Larry Heinemann received the National Book Award for Fiction. The announcement that Heinemann had won for his Vietnam War novel Paco’s Story (1986) astonished the ballroom of authors, editors, and booksellers because the nominees included two of the biggest names in American literature, Toni Morrison and Philip Roth. Morrison had been nominated for Beloved (1987), a novel that secured her status, Margaret Atwood declared in a New York Times review that fall, as the “pre-eminent American novelist” and would be cited by the Swedish Academy six years later when it awarded her the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Morrison had invited three tables of friends and associates to the National Book Award gala, and they, like the rest of the audience, were shocked to see Heinemann, a little-known white writer from Chicago, take the stage and receive a bronze statue for his slender war novel. “I didn’t come here expecting to win,” Heinemann later admitted. “I came here for the party.”
Forty-eight black writers signed a statement in The New York Times Book Review condemning the “oversight and harmful whimsy” that had left Morrison, by then the author of five acclaimed novels, with neither a National Book Award nor a Pulitzer Prize. Liberal and conservative critics fired back. …
