Jazz

Jazz is a historical novel by the American writer Toni Morrison, published in 1992. It is the second part of her trilogy on African-American history, which begins with Beloved and ends with Paradise.

The novel opens in Harlem in the winter of 1926, where Joe Trace, a middle-aged salesman, shoots the young woman he has been seeing, and his wife Violet attacks the body at the funeral. Morrison then moves back through the lives of everyone involved, including Joe and Violet's own migration from the rural South, the girl's mother and her household, and the city that drew them all north. The past is told out of order, and the narrating voice comments on the characters and on its own version of events.

Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, and this was her most recent novel at the time of the award. She spent three years researching the period and its music while writing it. The narrating voice is one of the book's subjects in its own right, and it addresses the reader directly.