Sula, written by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, was first published in 1973. Morrison was the author of 11 novels and four works of nonfiction. Sula was her second novel, following her 1970 début The Bluest Eye. Morrison published both novels while still working as an editor at Random House, where she edited books by Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, and Gayl Jones. Morrison was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon (1977) and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987). The latter was turned into a film in 1998, starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. Morrison was also twice nominated for the National Book Award. Her first nomination was for Sula. Morrison, who long-served as a professor of English at Princeton University, died in 2019. In the same year, a documentary about her life, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, arrived in theaters.

Content Warning: The source material and this guide feature depictions of racism, death, death by suicide, child death, graphic violence, sexual content, substance use, addiction, religious discrimination, ableism, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, cursing, rape, animal death, mental illness, child abuse, bullying, and illness.

Language Note: The source material features outdated and offensive racial terminology, which this guide reproduces only in quoted material.

Plot Summary

A World War I veteran named Shadrack returns to the Black neighborhood of the Bottom in the town of Medallion, Ohio, after fighting in France. Not long after going back home, he institutes a “National Suicide Day” when (he proposes) the citizens of Medallion can commit murder or die by suicide.

The narrative then goes back in time several decades to describe the origins of the Wright family, respected residents of the Bottom. Helene Wright (née Sabat) was born in New Orleans, the daughter of a sex worker and the granddaughter of a devout Catholic matron, who raised her. After meeting Wiley Wright, an employee on a Great Lakes liner, she moves to Medallion and gives birth to her only child, Nel. Helene returns to New Orleans only once, with her daughter in tow, with the intention of visiting her beloved grandmother before her death. However, she arrives too late and encounters her mother instead. The trip to the South is pivotal for Nel, who witnesses her mother’s internalized racism and how Helene’s superior manner is designed to disguise her origins, which she perceives as shameful. 

When Nel returns to Medallion, she befriends a girl named Sula Peace as an act of defiance, as Sula and her grandmother, Eva, are unconventional in ways that make them outsiders in the town. As they enter adolescence, the girls forge their bond through their similar curiosity, Sula’s fiercely protective instincts, and their shared secret regarding the accidental murder of a local boy nicknamed Chicken Little. During these years, strange things occur. The most devastating is the death of Hannah, Sula’s mother, who burns to death. When she turns 17, Nel marries local boy, Jude Greene, and has three children with him. She settles in Medallion while Sula goes off to attend college in Nashville and to live in various cities around the country.

Bored with the uniformity that she finds in major cities, Sula returns to Medallion and reunites with her old friend. However, their friendship falls apart due to Sula’s decision to begin a sexual relationship with Jude, who leaves Nel and his children to be with Sula. After Sula discards him, he buys a bus ticket to Detroit and is never again seen. Meanwhile, Sula starts a romance with Ajax, a local man she remembered from her youth. That, too, comes to an end when he senses that Sula is becoming possessive of him.

Several years later, Sula falls ill and Nel visits her. Unable to get a clear answer from Sula about why she slept with her husband, Nel leaves her friend and never sees her again. Sula dies not long after Nel leaves the house on 7 Carpenter Road, where Sula had grown up. Only Shadrack, another outcast, mourns Sula’s passing, as Sula’s return to the Bottom had united the community against her. With her gone, however, they no lack a common enemy and resume their old, indifferent ways. In 1941, they unite in an unusual act of defiance and destroy a tunnel that they had been forbidden to work on due to racist hiring practices. They tear the edifice apart and vandalize construction materials. Some of them die in the process.

Twenty-four years later, Nel finds herself settling unhappily into middle age. She decides to pay Eva a visit in the retirement home to which Sula had sent her years before. Eva now has dementia but reminds Nel about the death of Chicken Little during a moment of clarity. She says that both Nel and Sula were responsible, for the girls had been one and the same during their girlhood.

While leaving the home, Nel finds herself missing her friend. She stops suddenly in the street, halted by a burning in the corner of her eye. She calls out for Sula and speaks to no one about her sudden sorrow. Long unable to cry after the loss of her husband, she suddenly finds herself deeply sorrowful.