In 1977, Morrison wrote to an aspiring novelist that the work was “extremely honest, forthright and moving in ways I had not expected it to be”. She passed it around the office to get support, but her colleagues found it depressing. “You don’t want to escape and I don’t want to escape,” she wrote, “but perhaps the public does and perhaps we are in the business of helping them do that.”

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Morrison’s frustrations might well have played a part in her decision to quit. In 1981, she issued a warning in a speech to the American Writers Congress that “something is terribly wrong” in the industry.

It was the era of global consolidation, which has continued: today, the mainstream publishing world has shrunk to the “Big Five” (Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette and Macmillan). I suspect that if she were a young woman in publishing today, Morrison might be working for a small press with modest print runs but exciting and experimental publications.

The one thing missing from Moe’s perceptive piece is the names of the authors Morrison rejected. Did any of them get published elsewhere, and did any of them eventually become almost as famous as Morrison herself? I do hope so.