Toni Morrison Paradise Signed Hardback Book Nobel Prize African American

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Seller: memorabilia111 ✉️ (808) 100%, Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, Ships to: US & many other countries, Item: 176277810561 TONI MORRISON PARADISE SIGNED HARDBACK BOOK NOBEL PRIZE AFRICAN AMERICAN. Author...... Morrison, Toni Title....... Paradise Publisher... London: Chatto & Windus, 1998 Cloth. Very Good/Very Good. First Thus. VG dj. Signed by Author. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor and college professor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. 
I will call them my people which were not my people: and her beloved which was not beloved. - Romans 9:25 With this passage, Toni Morrison leads her readers into ''Beloved,'' a universe of complicated, sweetly desiring, fierce and deeply seductive human beings hitherto subsumed by, hitherto stifled by, that impenetrable nobody-noun: ''the slave.'' That same scripture might well stand as the cradling text or tight-lipped summary of the chaotic, chimerical and frightening task America imposes upon any one of us chosen to be or choosing to become a black artist in this freedom land. For example, even as we mourn the passing of so legendary a writer as James Baldwin, and even as we may revel in the posthumous acclamations of his impact and his public glory, how shall we yet grieve, relieve or altogether satisfy? How shall we explain the exile of this man who wanted to be loved so much at home? How shall we forget the declaration of this native son who once said, ''I'm worth more dead than alive.'' Celebrity is not a serious embrace. It is a fact that James Baldwin, celebrated worldwide and posthumously designated as ''immortal'' and as ''the conscience of his generation,'' it is a fact that Baldwin never received the honor of these keystones to the canon of American literature: the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize: never. And so we have buried this native son, Jimmy Baldwin, with a grief that goes beyond our sorrow at his death. We also grieve for every black artist who survives him in this freedom land. We grieve because we cannot yet assure that such shame, such national neglect will not occur again, and then again. From that actual and emblematic death we turn, determined, to the living: 18 years ago the living black writer, Toni Morrison, demanded our collective and our private confrontation with the power of her work. Her first novel, ''The Bluest Eye,'' published in 1970, irreversibly abraded our responsible, unwilling consciousness with tragedies of absolute, interior dislocation: the unbearable self-loathing of one black child, Pecola Breedlove, who could not es-cape America. From that austere, that chiseled moment of publication here, among us, the written wizardry of Toni Morrison has earned her several books, best-seller popularity and a required reading presence on every respectable campus of the United States. Throughout, she has persisted in the task of calling ''her beloved / which was not beloved.'' She has insisted on the subjects of her sorrowing concern: ''my people / which were not my people'' - black children and women and men variously not themselves, variously not yet free from an inexplicable, mad, impinging hatred that would throttle or derange all village/family/sexual love. And devoutly, she has conjured up alternatives to such a destiny: political and skin-close means to a transcendent self-respect. Today, all the literate world knows Toni Morrison. June Jordan Houston A. Baker Jr. STATEMENT Despite the international stature of Toni Morrison, she has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve: she has yet to receive the keystone honors of the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize. We, the undersigned black critics and black writers, here assert ourselves against such oversight and harmful whimsy. The legitimate need for our own critical voice in relation to our own literature can no longer be denied. We, therefore, urgently affirm our rightful and positive authority in the realm of American letters and, in this prideful context, we do raise this tribute to the author of ''The Bluest Eye,'' ''Sula,'' ''Song of Solomon,'' ''Tar Baby'' and ''Beloved'': Alive, we write this testament of thanks to you, dear Toni: alive, beloved and persevering, magical. Among the fecund intimacies of our hidden past, and among the coming days of dream or nightmares that will follow from the bidden knowledge of our conscious heart, we find your life work ever building to a monument of vision and discovery and trust. You have never turned away the searching eye, the listening ear attuned to horror or to histories providing for our faith. And freely you have given to us every word that you have found important to the forward movement of our literature, our life. For all of America, for all of American letters, you have advanced the moral and artistic standards by which we must measure the daring and the love of our national imagination and our collective intelligence as a people. Your gifts to us have changed and made more gentle our real time together. And so we write, here, hoping not to delay, not to arrive, in any way, late with this, our simple tribute to the seismic character and beauty of your writing. And, furthermore, in grateful wonder at the advent of ''Beloved,'' your most recent gift to our community, our country, our conscience, our courage flourishing as it grows, we here record our pride, our respect and our appreciation for the treasury of your findings and invention. Robert Allen, Maya Angelou, Houston A. Baker Jr., Toni Cade Bambara, Amina Baraka, Amiri Baraka, Jerome Brooks, Wesley Brown, Robert Chrisman, Barbara Christian, Lucille Clifton, J. California Cooper, Jayne Cortez, Angela Davis, Thulani Davis, Alexis De Veaux. Mari Evans, Nikky Finney, Ernest J. Gaines, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Paula Giddings, Vertamae Grosvenor, Cheryll Y. Greene, Rosa Guy, Calvin Hernton, Nathan Irvin Huggins, Gloria T. Hull, Gale Jackson, June Jordan, Paule Marshall, Nellie McKay, Louise Meriwether. Louise Patterson, Richard Perry, Arnold Rampersad, Eugene Redmond, Sonia Sanchez, Hortense Spillers, Luisah Teish, Joyce Carol Thomas, Eleanor Traylor, Quincy Troupe, Alice Walker, Mary Helen Washington, John Wideman, Margaret Wilkerson, John A. Williams, Sherley Anne Williams. Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford;[2] February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor and college professor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she gained worldwide recognition when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.[3] Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English.[4] She earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her perhaps most celebrated work, Beloved, was made into a 1998 film. Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States.[5] The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities, in 1996. She was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on May 29, 2012. She received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. Morrison was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020.[6] Contents 1 Early years 2 Career 2.1 Adulthood and editing career: 1949–1975 2.2 First writings and teaching, 1970–1986 2.3 The Beloved Trilogy and the Nobel Prize: 1987–1998 2.4 Beloved onscreen and "the Oprah effect" 2.5 The early 21st century 2.6 Princeton years 2.7 Final years: 2010–2019 3 Personal life 4 Death and memorial 5 Politics, literary reception and legacy 5.1 Politics 5.2 Relationship to feminism 5.3 National Memorial for Peace and Justice 5.4 Papers 5.5 Toni Morrison Day 6 Documentary films 7 Awards and nominations 7.1 Awards 7.2 Nominations 8 Bibliography 8.1 Novels 8.2 Children's books (with Slade Morrison) 8.3 Short fiction 8.4 Plays 8.5 Poetry 8.6 Libretto 8.7 Non-fiction 8.8 Articles 9 See also 10 Notes 11 References 12 External links Early years Chloe Ardelia Wofford, the second of four children from a working-class, black family, was born in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford.[7] Her mother was born in Greenville, Alabama, and moved north with her family as a child. She was a homemaker and a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.[8] George Wofford grew up in Cartersville, Georgia. When Wofford was about 15, a group of white people lynched two black businessmen who lived on his street. Morrison later said: "He never told us that he'd seen bodies. But he had seen them. And that was too traumatic, I think, for him."[9] Soon after the lynching, George Wofford moved to the racially integrated town of Lorain, Ohio, in the hope of escaping racism and securing gainful employment in Ohio's burgeoning industrial economy. He worked odd jobs and as a welder for U.S. Steel. Traumatized by his experiences of racism, in a 2015 interview Morrison said her father hated whites so much he would not let them in the house.[10] When Morrison was about two years old, her family's landlord set fire to the house in which they lived, while they were home, because her parents could not afford to pay rent. Her family responded to what she called this "bizarre form of evil" by laughing at the landlord rather than falling into despair. Morrison later said her family's response demonstrated how to keep your integrity and claim your own life in the face of acts of such "monumental crudeness."[11] Morrison's parents instilled in her a sense of heritage and language through telling traditional African-American folktales, ghost stories, and singing songs.[8][12] Morrison also read frequently as a child; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy.[13] She became a Catholic at the age of 12 and took the baptismal name Anthony (after Anthony of Padua), which led to her nickname, Toni.[14] Attending Lorain High School, she was on the debate team, the yearbook staff, and in the drama club.[8] Career Adulthood and editing career: 1949–1975 In 1949, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., seeking the company of fellow black intellectuals.[15] It was while at Howard that she encountered racially segregated restaurants and buses for the first time.[9] She graduated in 1953 with a B.A. in English and went on to earn a Master of Arts from Cornell University in 1955. Her master's thesis was titled "Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's treatment of the alienated."[16] She taught English, first at Texas Southern University in Houston from 1955 to 1957, and then at Howard University for the next seven years. While teaching at Howard, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. Their first son was born in 1961 and she was pregnant with their second son when she and Harold divorced in 1964.[12][17][18] After her divorce and the birth of her son Slade in 1965, Morrison began working as an editor for L. W. Singer, a textbook division of publisher Random House,[8] in Syracuse, New York. Two years later, she transferred to Random House in New York City, where she became their first black woman senior editor in the fiction department.[19][20] In that capacity, Morrison played a vital role in bringing Black literature into the mainstream. One of the first books she worked on was the groundbreaking Contemporary African Literature (1972), a collection that included work by Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and South African playwright Athol Fugard.[8] She fostered a new generation of Afro-American writers,[8] including poet and novelist Toni Cade Bambara, radical activist Angela Davis, Black Panther Huey Newton[21] and novelist Gayl Jones, whose writing Morrison discovered. She also brought to publication the 1975 autobiography of the outspoken boxing champion Muhammad Ali, The Greatest: My Own Story. In addition, she published and promoted the work of Henry Dumas,[22] a little-known novelist and poet who in 1968 had been shot to death by a transit officer in the New York City Subway.[9][23] Among other books that Morrison developed and edited is The Black Book (1974), an anthology of photographs, illustrations, essays, and documents of black life in the United States from the time of slavery to the 1920s.[9] Random House had been uncertain about the project but its publication met with a good reception. Alvin Beam reviewed the anthology for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, writing: "Editors, like novelists, have brain children – books they think up and bring to life without putting their own names on the title page. Mrs. Morrison has one of these in the stores now, and magazines and newsletters in the publishing trade are ecstatic, saying it will go like hotcakes."[8] First writings and teaching, 1970–1986 Morrison had begun writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard University who met to discuss their work. She attended one meeting with a short story about a black girl who longed to have blue eyes. Morrison later developed the story as her first novel, The Bluest Eye, getting up every morning at 4 am to write, while raising two children on her own.[17] Morrison's portrait on the first-edition dust jacket of The Bluest Eye (1970) The Bluest Eye was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1970, when Morrison was aged 39.[20] It was favorably reviewed in The New York Times by John Leonard, who praised Morrison's writing style as being "a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry ... But The Bluest Eye is also history, sociology, folklore, nightmare and music."[24] The novel did not sell well at first, but the City University of New York put The Bluest Eye on its reading list for its new Black studies department, as did other colleges, which boosted sales.[25] The book also brought Morrison to the attention of the acclaimed editor Robert Gottlieb at Knopf, an imprint of the publisher Random House. Gottlieb later edited most of Morrison's novels.[25] In 1975, Morrison's second novel Sula (1973), about a friendship between two black women, was nominated for the National Book Award. Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), follows the life of Macon "Milkman" Dead III, from birth to adulthood, as he discovers his heritage. This novel brought her national acclaim, being a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940.[26] Song of Solomon also won the National Book Critics Circle Award.[27] At its 1979 commencement ceremonies, Barnard College awarded Morrison its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction.[28] Morrison gave her next novel, Tar Baby (1981), a contemporary setting. In it, a looks-obsessed fashion model, Jadine, falls in love with Son, a penniless drifter who feels at ease with being black.[17] In 1983, Morrison left publishing to devote more time to writing, while living in a converted boathouse on the Hudson River in Nyack, New York.[29][30] She taught English at two branches of the State University of New York (SUNY) and at Rutgers University's New Brunswick campus.[31] In 1984, she was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University at Albany, SUNY.[32] Morrison's first play, Dreaming Emmett, is about the 1955 murder by white men of black teenager Emmett Till. The play was performed in 1986 at the State University of New York at Albany, where she was teaching at the time.[33] Morrison was also a visiting professor at Bard College from 1986 to 1988.[34] The Beloved Trilogy and the Nobel Prize: 1987–1998 Morrison, with her sons Harold (left) and Slade (right) at their upstate New York home, between 1980-87 In 1987, Morrison published her most celebrated novel, Beloved. It was inspired by the true story of an enslaved African-American woman, Margaret Garner,[35] whose story Morrison had discovered when compiling The Black Book. Garner had escaped slavery but was pursued by slave hunters. Facing a return to slavery, Garner killed her two-year-old daughter but was captured before she could kill herself.[36] Morrison's novel imagines the dead baby returning as a ghost, Beloved, to haunt her mother and family.[37] Beloved was a critical success and a bestseller for 25 weeks. The New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote that the scene of the mother killing her baby is "so brutal and disturbing that it appears to warp time before and after into a single unwavering line of fate."[38] Canadian writer Margaret Atwood wrote in a review for The New York Times, "Ms. Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, Beloved will put them to rest."[39] Not all critics praised Beloved, however. African-American conservative social critic Stanley Crouch, for instance, complained in his review in The New Republic[40] that the novel "reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries," and that Morrison "perpetually interrupts her narrative with maudlin ideological commercials."[41][42] Despite overall high acclaim, Beloved failed to win the prestigious National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award. Forty-eight black critics and writers,[43][44] among them Maya Angelou, protested the omission in a statement that The New York Times published on January 24, 1988.[20][45][46] "Despite the international stature of Toni Morrison, she has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve," they wrote.[9] Two months later, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[38] It also won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.[47] Beloved is the first of three novels about love and African-American history, sometimes called the Beloved Trilogy.[48] Morrison said that they are intended to be read together, explaining, "The conceptual connection is the search for the beloved – the part of the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you."[11] The second novel in the trilogy, Jazz, came out in 1992. Told in language that imitates the rhythms of jazz music, the novel is about a love triangle during the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. That year she also published her first book of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), an examination of the African-American presence in white American literature.[47] (In 2016, Time magazine noted that Playing in the Dark was among Morrison's most-assigned texts on U.S. college campuses, together with several of her novels and her 1993 Nobel Prize lecture.)[49] Before the third novel of the Beloved Trilogy was published, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. The citation praised her as an author "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."[50] She was the first black woman of any nationality to win the prize.[51] In her acceptance speech, Morrison said: "We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."[52] In her Nobel lecture, Morrison talked about the power of storytelling. To make her point, she told a story. She spoke about a blind, old, black woman who is approached by a group of young people. They demand of her, "Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? ... Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story."[53] In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for "distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities."[54] Morrison's lecture, entitled "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations,"[55] began with the aphorism: "Time, it seems, has no future." She cautioned against the misuse of history to diminish expectations of the future.[56] Morrison was also honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which is awarded to a writer "who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work."[57] The third novel of her Beloved Trilogy, Paradise, about citizens of an all-black town, came out in 1997. The following year, Morrison was on the cover of Time magazine, making her only the second female writer of fiction and second black writer of fiction to appear on what was perhaps the most significant U.S. magazine cover of the era.[58] Beloved onscreen and "the Oprah effect" Also in 1998, the movie adaptation of Beloved was released, directed by Jonathan Demme and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey, who had spent ten years bringing it to the screen. Winfrey also stars as the main character, Sethe, alongside Danny Glover as Sethe's lover, Paul D, and Thandie Newton as Beloved.[59] The movie flopped at the box office. A review in The Economist suggested that "most audiences are not eager to endure nearly three hours of a cerebral film with an original storyline featuring supernatural themes, murder, rape and slavery."[60] Film critic Janet Maslin, however, in her New York Times review "No Peace from a Brutal Legacy" called it a "transfixing, deeply felt adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel. ... Its linchpin is of course Oprah Winfrey, who had the clout and foresight to bring 'Beloved' to the screen and has the dramatic presence to hold it together."[61] In 1996, television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey selected Song of Solomon for her newly launched Book Club, which became a popular feature on her Oprah Winfrey Show.[62] An average of 13 million viewers watched the show's book club segments.[63] As a result, when Winfrey selected Morrison's earliest novel The Bluest Eye in 2000, it sold another 800,000 paperback copies.[8] John Young wrote in the African American Review in 2001 that Morrison's career experienced the boost of "The Oprah Effect, ... enabling Morrison to reach a broad, popular audience."[64] Winfrey selected a total of four of Morrison's novels over six years, giving Morrison's novels a bigger sales boost than they got from her Nobel Prize win in 1993.[65] The novelist also appeared three times on Winfrey's show. Winfrey said, "For all those who asked the question 'Toni Morrison again?'... I say with certainty there would have been no Oprah's Book Club if this woman had not chosen to share her love of words with the world."[63] Morrison called the book club a "reading revolution."[63] The early 21st century Morrison continued to explore different art forms, such as providing texts for original scores of classical music. She collaborated with André Previn on the song cycle Honey and Rue, which premiered with Kathleen Battle in January 1992, and on Four Songs, premiered at Carnegie Hall with Sylvia McNair in November 1994. Both Sweet Talk: Four Songs on Text and Spirits In the Well (1997) were written for Jessye Norman with music by Richard Danielpour, and, alongside Maya Angelou and Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Morrison provided the text for composer Judith Weir's woman.life.song commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Jessye Norman, which premiered in April 2000.[66][67] Morrison returned to Margaret Garner's life story, the basis of her novel Beloved, to write the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner. Completed in 2002, with music by Richard Danielpour, the opera was premièred on May 7, 2005, at the Detroit Opera House with Denyce Graves in the title role.[68] Love, Morrison's first novel since Paradise, came out in 2003. In 2004, she put together a children's book called Remember to mark the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954 that declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional.[69] From 1997 to 2003, Morrison was an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.[70] In June 2005, the University of Oxford awarded Morrison an honorary Doctor of Letters degree.[71] In spring 2006, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best work of American fiction published in the previous 25 years, as chosen by a selection of prominent writers, literary critics, and editors.[72] In his essay about the choice, "In Search of the Best," critic A. O. Scott said: "Any other outcome would have been startling, since Morrison's novel has inserted itself into the American canon more completely than any of its potential rivals. With remarkable speed, 'Beloved' has, less than 20 years after its publication, become a staple of the college literary curriculum, which is to say a classic. This triumph is commensurate with its ambition, since it was Morrison's intention in writing it precisely to expand the range of classic American literature, to enter, as a living black woman, the company of dead white males like Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne and Twain."[73] In November 2006, Morrison visited the Louvre museum in Paris as the second in its "Grand Invité" program to guest-curate a month-long series of events across the arts on the theme of "The Foreigner's Home", about which The New York Times said: "In tapping her own African-American culture, Ms. Morrison is eager to credit 'foreigners' with enriching the countries where they settle."[74][75][76] Morrison's novel A Mercy, released in 2008, is set in the Virginia colonies of 1682. Diane Johnson, in her review in Vanity Fair, called A Mercy "a poetic, visionary, mesmerizing tale that captures, in the cradle of our present problems and strains, the natal curse put on us back then by the Indian tribes, Africans, Dutch, Portuguese, and English competing to get their footing in the New World against a hostile landscape and the essentially tragic nature of human experience."[77] Princeton years From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University.[13] She said she did not think much of modern fiction writers who reference their own lives instead of inventing new material, and she used to tell her creative writing students, "I don't want to hear about your little life, OK?" Similarly, she chose not to write about her own life in a memoir or autobiography.[15] Though based in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton, Morrison did not regularly offer writing workshops to students after the late 1990s, a fact that earned her some criticism. Rather, she conceived and developed the Princeton Atelier, a program that brings together students with writers and performing artists. Together the students and the artists produce works of art that are presented to the public after a semester of collaboration.[78] Morrison speaking in 2008 Inspired by her curatorship at the Louvre Museum, Morrison returned to Princeton in fall 2008 to lead a small seminar, also entitled "The Foreigner's Home".[19] On November 17, 2017, Princeton University dedicated Morrison Hall (a building previously called West College) in her honor.[79] Final years: 2010–2019 In May 2010, Morrison appeared at PEN World Voices for a conversation with Marlene van Niekerk and Kwame Anthony Appiah about South African literature, and specifically van Niekerk's 2004 novel Agaat.[80] Morrison wrote books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison, who was a painter and a musician. Slade died of pancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, aged 45.[25][81] Morrison's novel Home (2012) was half-completed when Slade died.[25] In May 2011, Morrison received an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Rutgers University–New Brunswick during the commencement ceremony,[82] where she delivered a powerful speech on the "pursuit of life, liberty, meaningfulness, integrity, and truth." Morrison in 2013 Morrison debuted another work in 2011: She worked with opera director Peter Sellars and Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré on a new production, Desdemona, taking a fresh look at William Shakespeare's tragedy Othello. The trio focused on the relationship between Othello's wife Desdemona and her African nursemaid, Barbary, who is only briefly referenced in Shakespeare. The play, a mix of words, music and song, premiered in Vienna in 2011.[19][15][83] Morrison had stopped working on her latest novel when her son died. She said that afterwards, "I stopped writing until I began to think, He would be really put out if he thought that he had caused me to stop. 'Please, Mom, I'm dead, could you keep going ...?'"[84] She completed Home and dedicated it to her son Slade Morrison.[14][85][86] Published in 2012, it is the story of a Korean War veteran in the segregated United States of the 1950s, who tries to save his sister from brutal medical experiments at the hands of a white doctor.[84] In August 2012, Oberlin College became the home base of the Toni Morrison Society,[87] an international literary society founded in 1983, dedicated to scholarly research of Morrison's work.[88][89][90] Morrison's eleventh novel, God Help the Child, was published in 2015. It follows Bride, an executive in the fashion and beauty industry whose mother tormented her as a child for being dark-skinned – a childhood trauma that has dogged Bride her whole life.[91] Morrison was a member of the editorial advisory board of The Nation, a magazine started in 1865 by Northern abolitionists.[92][69] Personal life While teaching at Howard University from 1957 to 1964, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. She took his last name, and became known as Toni Morrison. Their first son Harold Ford was born in 1961. She was pregnant with their second son when she and Harold divorced in 1964. [12][17][93] Her second son Slade Kevin was born after her divorce, in 1965. Morrison began working as an editor for L. W. Singer, a textbook division of publisher Random House,[8] in Syracuse, New York. She moved with her sons as her career took her to different positions in different places. She worked on books for children with her son Slade Morrison, who was a painter and a musician. Slade died of pancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, aged 45.[25][94] Morrison was halfway through writing her novel Home when her younger son died. She stopped work on the novel for a year or two, before completing it; that novel was published in 2012. Death and memorial Morrison died at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, New York City, on August 5, 2019, from complications of pneumonia. She was 88 years old.[3][95][96] Upon her death, Morrison had a net worth of 20 million dollars.[97] A memorial tribute was held for Morrison on November 21, 2019, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. At this gathering she was eulogized by, among others, Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, Michael Ondaatje, David Remnick, Fran Lebowitz, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Edwidge Danticat.[98] The jazz saxophonist David Murray performed a musical tribute.[99] Politics, literary reception and legacy Politics Street art depicting Morrison in Vitoria, Spain Morrison was not afraid to comment on American politics and race relations. In writing about the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton, she claimed that since Whitewater, Bill Clinton was being mistreated in the same way black people often are: Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.[100] The phrase "our first Black president" was adopted as a positive by Bill Clinton supporters. When the Congressional Black Caucus honored the former president at its dinner in Washington, D.C. on September 29, 2001, for instance, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), the chair, told the audience that Clinton "took so many initiatives he made us think for a while we had elected the first black president."[101] In the context of the 2008 Democratic Primary campaign, Morrison stated to Time magazine: "People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race."[102] In the Democratic primary contest for the 2008 presidential race, Morrison endorsed Senator Barack Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton,[103] though expressing admiration and respect for the latter.[104] When he won, Morrison said she felt like an American for the first time. She said, "I felt very powerfully patriotic when I went to the inauguration of Barack Obama. I felt like a kid."[14] In April 2015, speaking of the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Walter Scott – three unarmed black men killed by white police officers – Morrison said: "People keep saying, 'We need to have a conversation about race.' This is the conversation. I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back. And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, 'Is it over?', I will say yes."[105] After the 2016 election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, Morrison wrote an essay, "Mourning for Whiteness," published in the November 21, 2016 issue of The New Yorker. In it she argues that white Americans are so afraid of losing privileges afforded them by their race that white voters elected Trump, whom she described as being "endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan", in order to keep the idea of white supremacy alive.[106][107] Relationship to feminism Although her novels typically concentrate on black women, Morrison did not identify her works as feminist. When asked in a 1998 interview, "Why distance oneself from feminism?" she replied: "In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book – leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity."[108] She went on to state that she thought it "off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I'm involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don't subscribe to patriarchy, and I don't think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it's a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things."[108] In 2012, she responded to a question about the difference between black and white feminists in the 1970s. "Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves," she explained. "They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed."[84] W. S. Kottiswari writes in Postmodern Feminist Writers (2008) that Morrison exemplifies characteristics of "postmodern feminism" by "altering Euro-American dichotomies by rewriting a history written by mainstream historians" and by her usage of shifting narration in Beloved and Paradise. Kottiswari states: "Instead of western logocentric abstractions, Morrison prefers the powerful vivid language of women of color ... She is essentially postmodern since her approach to myth and folklore is re-visionist."[109] National Memorial for Peace and Justice A quote from Morrison at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, includes writing by Morrison.[110] Visitors can see her quote after they have walked through the section commemorating individual victims of lynching.[111] Papers The Toni Morrison Papers are part of the permanent library collections of Princeton University, where they are held in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.[112][113] Morrison's decision to offer her papers to Princeton instead of to her alma mater Howard University was criticized by some within the historically black colleges and universities community.[114] Toni Morrison Day In 2019, a resolution was passed in her hometown of Lorain, Ohio, to designate February 18, her birthday, as "Toni Morrison Day." Additional legislation was introduced to also proclaim that date as "Toni Morrison Day" throughout the State of Ohio.[115][116][117] The legislation, HB 325, was passed by the Ohio House of Representatives on December 2, 2020[118] and signed into law by Governor Mike DeWine on December 21, 2020.[119] Documentary films Morrison was interviewed by Margaret Busby in a 1988 documentary film by Sindamani Bridglal, entitled Identifiable Qualities, shown on Channel 4.[120][121] Morrison was the subject of a film titled Imagine – Toni Morrison Remembers, directed by Jill Nicholls and shown on BBC One television on July 15, 2015, in which Morrison talked to Alan Yentob about her life and work.[122][123][124] In 2016, Oberlin College received a grant to complete a documentary film begun in 2014, The Foreigner's Home, about Morrison's intellectual and artistic vision,[125] explored in the context of the 2006 exhibition she guest-curated at the Louvre.[126][127] The film's executive producer was Jonathan Demme.[128] It was directed by Oberlin College Cinema Studies faculty Geoff Pingree and Rian Brown,[129] and incorporates footage shot by Morrison's first-born son Harold Ford Morrison, who also consulted on the film.[130] In 2019, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.[131] People featured in the film include Morrison, Angela Davis, Oprah Winfrey, Sonia Sanchez, and Walter Mosley, among others.[132] Awards and nominations Awards 1977: National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon[133] 1977: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award[134] 1982: Ohio Women's Hall of Fame inductee[135] 1988: Robert F. Kennedy Book Award[136] 1988: Helmerich Award[137] 1988: American Book Award for Beloved[138] 1988: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations for Beloved[139] 1988: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved[38] 1988: Frederic G. Melcher Book Award for Beloved[140][a] 1988: Honorary Doctor of Laws at University of Pennsylvania[143][144] 1989: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Harvard University[145] 1993: Nobel Prize in Literature[146] 1993: Commander of the Arts and Letters, Paris[112] 1994: Condorcet Medal, Paris[147] 1994: Rhegium Julii Prize for Literature[148] 1996: Jefferson Lecture[149] 1996: National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters[150] 1997: Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Gustavus Adolphus College.[151] 2000: National Humanities Medal[152] 2002: 100 Greatest African Americans, list by Molefi Kete Asante[153] 2005: Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement[154][155] 2005: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from University of Oxford[156] 2008: New Jersey Hall of Fame inductee[157] 2009: Norman Mailer Prize, Lifetime Achievement[158] 2010: Officier de la Légion d'Honneur[159] 2010: Institute for Arts and Humanities Medal for Distinguished Contributions to the Arts and Humanities from the Pennsylvania State University[160] 2011: Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction[161] 2011: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Rutgers University Graduation Commencement[162] 2011: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Geneva[163][164] 2012: Presidential Medal of Freedom[165] 2013: The Nichols-Chancellor's Medal awarded by Vanderbilt University[166] 2013: Honorary Doctorate of Literature awarded by Princeton University[167] 2013: PEN Oakland – Josephine Miles Literary Award for Home[168] 2013: Writer in Residence at the American Academy in Rome[169] 2014: Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award given by the National Book Critics Circle[170][171] 2016: PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction[172][173] 2016: The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry (The Norton Lectures), Harvard University[174] 2016: The Edward MacDowell Medal, awarded by the MacDowell Colony[175] 2018: The Thomas Jefferson Medal, awarded by The American Philosophical Society[176] 2020: National Women's Hall of Fame inductee [177][178] 2020: Designation of "Toni Morrison Day" in Ohio, to be celebrated annually on her birthday, February 18 [179] Nominations Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children (2008) – Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?[180] Bibliography Novels Morrison, Toni (1970). The Bluest Eye. ISBN 0-452-28706-5. Morrison, Toni (1973). Sula. ISBN 1-4000-3343-8. Morrison, Toni (1977). Song of Solomon. ISBN 1-4000-3342-X. Morrison, Toni (1981). Tar Baby. ISBN 1-4000-3344-6. Morrison, Toni (1987). Beloved. ISBN 1-4000-3341-1. Morrison, Toni (1992). Jazz. ISBN 1-4000-7621-8. Morrison, Toni (1997). Paradise. ISBN 0-679-43374-0. Morrison, Toni (2003). Love. ISBN 0-375-40944-0. Morrison, Toni (2008). A Mercy. ISBN 978-0-307-26423-7. Morrison, Toni (2012). Home. ISBN 978-0307594167. Morrison, Toni (2015). God Help the Child. ISBN 978-0307594174. Children's books (with Slade Morrison) The Big Box (1999). ISBN 9780786823642. The Book of Mean People (2002). ISBN 9780786805402. Remember: The Journey to School Integration (2004). ISBN 9780618397402. Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper?, The Lion or the Mouse?, Poppy or the Snake? (2007). ISBN 9780743283915. Peeny Butter Fudge (2009). ISBN 9781442459007. Little Cloud and Lady Wind (2010). ISBN 1416985239. Please, Louise (2014). ISBN 9781416983385. Short fiction "Recitatif" (1983)[181] "Sweetness". The New Yorker. Vol. 90 no. 47. February 9, 2015. pp. 58–61. Plays Dreaming Emmett (performed 1986)[33] Desdemona (first performed May 15, 2011, in Vienna)[182][183][184] Poetry Five Poems (2002, limited edition book with illustrations by Kara Walker)[185][186] Libretto Margaret Garner (first performed May 2005)[3] Non-fiction Morrison, Toni, Goodness and the Literary Imagination : Harvard Divinity School's 95th Ingersoll Lecture : With Essays on Morrison's Moral and Religious Vision. Edited by ; Davíd Carrasco, Stephanie Paulsell, and Mara Willard. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Morrison, Toni (2009). "Foreword". In Harris, Middleton A.; Levitt, Morris; Furman, Roger; Smith, Ernest (eds.). The Black Book. Random House. ISBN 9781400068487. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (2007). ISBN 9780307388636[187] Editor and foreword (1992). Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. Pantheon Books. ISBN 9780679741459. Co-editor (1997), Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case. ISBN 9780307482266. Remember: The Journey to School Integration (2004). ISBN 9780618397402. What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn C. Denard (2008). ISBN 9781604730173. Editor (2009), Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word. ISBN 9780061878817. The Origin of Others – The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures; Foreword by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017). Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674976450. The Source of Self-Regard: Essays, Speeches, Meditations (2019). New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN 9780525521037. UK edition published as Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations (2019), London: Chatto & Windus, ISBN 978-1784742850. Articles "Introduction." Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. [1885] The Oxford Mark Twain, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. xxxii–xli. In May 2012 she was awarded the <a href="https://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/reference/two_column_table/Presidential_Medal_of_Freedom_Recipients.htm" target="_blank" target="_blank">Presidential Medal of Freedom</a> by President Barack Obama which recognizes people who have made a contribution to national interests, world peace or cultural endeavors. <br /><br />Morrison's 11th novel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/God-Help-Child-A-novel/dp/0307594173" target="_blank" target="_blank">God Help the Child</a>, is due to be published in April 2015.   <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/14/us/toni-morrison-fast-facts/" target="_blank">Toni Morrison</a>; the writer, editor and professor, has always moved people with her words, whether she's making a speech or writing a novel. <br /><br />To celebrate her wit and wisdom,  <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/specials/business/leading-women" target="_blank">Leading Women</a> have collated some of her most powerful quotes on topics from love to literature.<br /><br />By Phoebe Parke, for CNN.  Courtesy Kris Connor/Getty Images Toni Morrison; the writer, editor and professor, has always moved people with her words, whether she's making a speech or writing a novel. To celebrate her wit and wisdom, Leading Women have collated some of her most powerful quotes on topics from love to literature. By Phoebe Parke, for CNN. Morrison was born on February 18, 1931 in Ohio, and studied English first at <a href="http://www2.howard.edu/" target="_blank" target="_blank">Howard University</a> for her bachelors degree, then the same subject at <a href="http://www.cornell.edu/" target="_blank" target="_blank">Cornell University</a> at masters level, graduating in 1955.  She started teaching at <a href="http://www.tsu.edu/" target="_blank" target="_blank">Texas Southern University</a> in 1955 and then became an editor at <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/" target="_blank" target="_blank">Random House</a> in 1963. She edited the work of authors such as Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones. Toni married Harold Morrison on 1958 and had two children with him;  Harold Ford in 1961 and Slade Kevin in 1964, before their divorce in that same year. She wrote children's literature with her youngest son Slade who died in 2010. She dedicated her novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Home-Toni-Morrison/dp/0307594165" target="_blank" target="_blank">Home</a> to him.  Now a single mother of two, Morrison has written plays, children's literature, non-fiction and 10 novels, the first was <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Bluest-Eye-Toni-Morrison/dp/0099759918" target="_blank" target="_blank">The Bluest Eye</a>, published in 1970. The novel is set in Lorain, Ohio and tells the story of a young black girl who is insecure about her skin color and has an abusive relationship with her father.  Between 1984 and 1989 she served as the  Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at the <a href="http://www.suny.edu/" target="_blank" target="_blank">State University of New York</a> in Albany. <br />Morrison published her fifth novel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Beloved-Toni-Morrison/dp/1400033411" target="_blank" target="_blank">Beloved</a> in 1987 which received a <a href="http://www.pulitzer.org/awards/1988" target="_blank" target="_blank">Pulitzer Prize in 1988</a> and was made into a<a href="http://edition.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Movies/9810/20/review.beloved/" target="_blank"> film starring Oprah Winfrey</a> and Danny Glover in 1998.  She continued her work in education in 1989 when she became the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Council of the Humanities at <a href="http://www.princeton.edu/main/" target="_blank" target="_blank">Princeton University</a> until 2006.  Morrison became the first African-American woman to win a Nobel prize in 1993. She was awarded the <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/" target="_blank" target="_blank">Nobel Prize in Literature</a>, along with the statement: Toni Morrison, "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."  In May 2012 she was awarded the <a href="https://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/reference/two_column_table/Presidential_Medal_of_Freedom_Recipients.htm" target="_blank" target="_blank">Presidential Medal of Freedom</a> by President Barack Obama which recognizes people who have made a contribution to national interests, world peace or cultural endeavors. <br /><br />Morrison's 11th novel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/God-Help-Child-A-novel/dp/0307594173" target="_blank" target="_blank">God Help the Child</a>, is due to be published in April 2015.   <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/14/us/toni-morrison-fast-facts/" target="_blank">Toni Morrison</a>; the writer, editor and professor, has always moved people with her words, whether she's making a speech or writing a novel. <br /><br />To celebrate her wit and wisdom,  <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/specials/business/leading-women" target="_blank">Leading Women</a> have collated some of her most powerful quotes on topics from love to literature.<br /><br />By Phoebe Parke, for CNN.  Morrison was born on February 18, 1931 in Ohio, and studied English first at <a href="http://www2.howard.edu/" target="_blank" target="_blank">Howard University</a> for her bachelors degree, then the same subject at <a href="http://www.cornell.edu/" target="_blank" target="_blank">Cornell University</a> at masters level, graduating in 1955.  1 of 9PrevNext CNN —   Here’s a look at the life of Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison. Personal Birth date: February 18, 1931 Death date: August 5, 2019 Birth place: Lorain, Ohio Birth name: Chloe Anthony Wofford Father: George Wofford Mother: Ella Ramah (Willis) Wofford Marriage: Harold Morrison (1958-1964, divorced) Children: Slade and Harold Ford Education: Howard University, B.A., 1953; Cornell University, M.A., 1955 Other Facts Is the first African-American woman to win a Nobel Prize. Wrote the libretto for the opera “Margaret Garner,” which premiered in 2005. Timeline 1955-1957 - Teaches at Texas Southern University. 1957-1964 - Teaches at Howard University. 1963-1983 - Works as an editor at Random House. 1970 - “The Bluest Eye” is published. 1973 - “Sula” is published. 1977 - “Song of Solomon” is published. 1981 - “Tar Baby” is published. 1984 -1989 - Serves as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at the State University of New York in Albany. 1987 - “Beloved” is published. 1988 - Is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for “Beloved.” 1989-2006 - Serves as the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. 1993 - Is awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature. 1998 - The film version of “Beloved,” starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover, is released. 2000 - Is awarded the National Humanities Medal. 2001 - Is given the Pell Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. 2001 - Is given the Enoch Pratt Free Library Lifetime Literary Achievement Award. 2004 - “Remember: The Journey to School Integration” is published. 2004 - Is awarded the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Fiction for “Love.” 2005 - Is given the Coretta Scott King Award for “Remember: The Journey to School Integration.” 2010 - Morrison’s son Slade dies from pancreatic cancer. May 2012 - Is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. 2013 - Wins the NYC Literary Honors for Fiction. April 2015 - Morrison is announced as the 2016 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. 2017 - “The Origin of Others” is published. 2018 - Oprah Winfrey presents Morrison with The Center for Fiction’s “Lifetime of Excellence in Fiction” honor. 2019 - The documentary “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am” premieres at the Sundance Film Festival. August 5, 2019 - Morrison dies at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. Toni Morrison, the Nobel laureate in literature whose best-selling work explored black identity in America — and in particular the often crushing experience of black women — through luminous, incantatory prose resembling that of no other writer in English, died on Monday in the Bronx. She was 88. Her death, at Montefiore Medical Center, was announced by her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. A spokeswoman said the cause was complications of pneumonia. Ms. Morrison lived in Grand View-on-Hudson, N.Y. The first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1993, Ms. Morrison was the author of 11 novels as well as children’s books and essay collections. Among them were celebrated works like “Song of Solomon,” which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977, and “Beloved,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Ms. Morrison was one of the rare American authors whose books were both critical and commercial successes. Her novels appeared regularly on the New York Times best-seller list, were featured multiple times on Oprah Winfrey’s television book club and were the subject of myriad critical studies. A longtime faculty member at Princeton, Ms. Morrison lectured widely and was seen often on television. In awarding her the Nobel, the Swedish Academy cited her “novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import,” through which she “gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” Ms. Morrison animated that reality in prose that rings with the cadences of black oral tradition. Her plots are dreamlike and nonlinear, spooling backward and forward in time as though characters bring the entire weight of history to bear on their every act. ImageToni Morrison in an undated photo. Her prose, often luminous and incantatory, rings with the cadences of black oral tradition. Toni Morrison in an undated photo. Her prose, often luminous and incantatory, rings with the cadences of black oral tradition.Credit...James L. McGuire Her narratives mingle the voices of men, women, children and even ghosts in layered polyphony. Myth, magic and superstition are inextricably intertwined with everyday verities, a technique that caused Ms. Morrison’s novels to be likened often to those of Latin American magic realist writers like Gabriel García Márquez. In “Sula,” a woman blithely lets a train run over her leg for the insurance money it will give her family. In “Song of Solomon,” a baby girl is named Pilate by her father, who “had thumbed through the Bible, and since he could not read a word, chose a group of letters that seemed to him strong and handsome.” In “Beloved,” the specter of a murdered child takes up residence in the house of her murderer. Throughout Ms. Morrison’s work, elements like these coalesce around her abiding concern with slavery and its legacy. In her fiction, the past is often manifest in a harrowing present — a world of alcoholism, rape, incest and murder, recounted in unflinching detail. It is a world, Ms. Morrison writes in “Beloved” (the novel is set in the 19th century but stands as a metaphor for the 20th), in which “anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind.” “Not just work, kill or maim you, but dirty you,” she goes on. “Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up.” But as Ms. Morrison’s writing also makes clear, the past is just as strongly manifest in the bonds of family, community and race — bonds that let culture, identity and a sense of belonging be transmitted from parents to children to grandchildren. These generational links, her work unfailingly suggests, form the only salutary chains in human experience. Editors’ Picks 275 Minutes on Hold: Why Airline Customer Service Still Can’t Keep Up Yemenis in Brooklyn Reclaim High-End Coffee The Manny Diaries Continue reading the main story Image Ms. Morrison with her sons, Slade and Ford, at her home in 1978. At her death she lived in Grand View-on-Hudson, N.Y. Ms. Morrison with her sons, Slade and Ford, at her home in 1978. At her death she lived in Grand View-on-Hudson, N.Y.Credit...Jack Mitchell/Getty Images “She is a friend of my mind,” a character in “Beloved,” a former slave, thinks about the woman he loves. “She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” A First Doomed Heroine Ms. Morrison’s singular approach to narrative is evident in her first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” written in stolen moments between her day job as a book editor and her life as the single mother of two young sons. Published in 1970, it is narrated by Claudia McTeer, a black girl in Ohio, who with her sister, Frieda, is the product of a strict but loving home. The novel’s doomed heroine is their friend Pecola Breedlove, who at 11, growing up in an America inundated with images of Shirley Temple and Dick and Jane, believes she is ugly and prays for the one thing she is sure will save her: blue eyes. [Toni Morrison left behind a powerful literary legacy. These are her most essential books.] In a drunken, savagely misguided attempt to show Pecola she is desirable, her father rapes her, leaving her pregnant. Now an outcast both in the community and within her own fractured family, Pecola descends into madness, believing herself possessed of blue eyes at last. Reviewing the novel in The New York Times, John Leonard commended Ms. Morrison for telling the story “with a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.” The novel prefigures much of Ms. Morrison’s later work in its preoccupation with history — often painful — as seen through the lens of an individual life; with characters’ quests, tragic or successful, for their place in the world; with the redemptive power of community; and with the role women play in the survival of such communities. Image Ms. Morrison was the keynote speaker at a writers’ conference in New York in 1992. Her later work was preoccupied with history — often painful — as seen through the lens of an individual life. Ms. Morrison was the keynote speaker at a writers’ conference in New York in 1992. Her later work was preoccupied with history — often painful — as seen through the lens of an individual life.Credit...Lee Romero/The New York Times [ Toni Morrison: a writer who “enlarged the American imagination in ways we are only beginning to understand.” Read our critic’s appraisal. ] Ms. Morrison explored these themes even more overtly in her second novel, “Sula” (1973), about the return of a young woman, now a scandalous temptress, to her Midwestern hometown and the ostracism she confronts there, and in her third, “Song of Solomon” (1977), the book that cemented her reputation. That book, Ms. Morrison’s first to feature a male protagonist, centers on the journey, literal and spiritual, of a young Michigan man, Macon Dead III. Macon is known familiarly as Milkman, a bitter nickname stemming from the widespread knowledge that his unhappy, neurasthenic mother, “the daughter of the richest Negro doctor in town,” breast-fed him long past babyhood. (In “Song of Solomon” as in “Sula,” Ms. Morrison depicts black bourgeois life as one of arid atomization.) The novel chronicles Milkman’s journey through rural Pennsylvania, a trip nominally undertaken to recover a cache of gold said to have belonged to his family, but ultimately a voyage in pursuit of self. “Song of Solomon” was chosen as a main selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club, the first novel by a black author to be so honored since Richard Wright’s “Native Son” in 1940. Image Ms. Morrison in 1986. She was one of the rare American authors whose books were both critical and commercial successes. Ms. Morrison in 1986. She was one of the rare American authors whose books were both critical and commercial successes.Credit...Jack Manning/The New York Times [Readers share their stories of how Toni Morrison’s works affected their lives.] ‘Beloved’: Her Masterwork Ms. Morrison published “Beloved,” widely considered her masterwork, in 1987. The first of her novels to have an overtly historical setting, the book — rooted in a real 19th-century tragedy — unfolds about a decade after the end of the Civil War. Before the war, Sethe, a slave, had escaped from the Kentucky plantation on which she worked and crossed the Ohio River to Cincinnati. She also spirited out her baby daughter, not yet 2. “Sethe had twenty-eight days — the travel of one whole moon — of unslaved life,” Ms. Morrison wrote. “From the pure clear stream of spit that the little girl dribbled into her face to her oily blood was twenty-eight days. Days of healing, ease and real- talk. Days of company: knowing the names of forty, fifty other Negroes, their views, habits; where they had been and what done; of feeling their fun and sorrow along with her own, which made it better. One taught her the alphabet; another a stitch. All taught her how it felt to wake up at dawn and decide what to do with the day.” Then a slave catcher tracks Sethe down. Cornered, she cuts her daughter’s throat rather than see her returned to a life of degradation. Eighteen years pass. Sethe has been saved from the gallows by white Abolitionists and is later freed from jail with their help. She has resumed her life in Cincinnati with her surviving daughter, Denver, with whom she was pregnant when she fled Kentucky. One day, a strange, nearly silent young woman a little older than Denver materializes at their door. Known only as Beloved, she moves into the house and insinuates herself into every facet of their existence. Image Ms. Morrison receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2012. The medal was among the many laurels she received in her writing career. Ms. Morrison receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2012. The medal was among the many laurels she received in her writing career.Credit...Luke Sharrett for The New York Times “Beloved, she my daughter,” Sethe realizes in a stream-of-consciousness monologue toward the end of the book. “She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don’t have to explain a thing. I didn’t have time to explain before because it had to be done quick. Quick. She had to be safe and I put her where she would be.” Widely acclaimed by book critics, “Beloved” was made into a 1998 feature film directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Ms. Winfrey. For mid-20th-century readers, one of the most striking things about Ms. Morrison’s work was that it delineates a world in which white people are largely absent, a relatively rare thing in fiction of the period. What was more, the milieu of her books, typically small-town and Midwestern, “offers an escape from stereotyped black settings,” as she said in an interview in “Conversations With Toni Morrison” (1994; edited by Danielle Taylor-Guthrie), adding, “It is neither plantation nor ghetto.” Origins of a Nickname It was in just such a setting that Ms. Morrison herself was reared. The daughter of George Wofford and Ella Ramah (Willis) Wofford, she was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on Feb. 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, an integrated working-class community about 30 miles west of Cleveland. George Wofford was a shipyard welder who took such pride in his work that, according to many accounts of Ms. Morrison’s life, when he finished a perfect seam he would write his initials on it, where they endured, unseen, in the skeleton of the ship. Image Ms. Morrison in 1994 at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York. In granting her the Nobel the year before, the Swedish Academy cited the “visionary force and poetic import” of her novels, through which she “gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” Ms. Morrison in 1994 at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York. In granting her the Nobel the year before, the Swedish Academy cited the “visionary force and poetic import” of her novels, through which she “gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”Credit...Kathy Willens/Associated Press Young Chloe grew up in a house suffused with narrative and superstition. She adored listening to ghost stories; her grandmother ritually consulted a book on dream interpretation, from which she divined the day’s selections when she played the numbers. At 12, Chloe joined the Roman Catholic Church. She took the baptismal name Anthony, becoming known as Chloe Anthony Wofford. That name would be the seed from which her nickname would spring a few years later, when she was an undergraduate at Howard University in Washington. She began calling herself Toni then, she said, because her classmates found the name Chloe bewildering. After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Howard with a major in English and a minor in classics in 1953, she earned a master’s in English from Cornell in 1955. She taught English for two years at Texas Southern University, a historically black institution in Houston, before returning to Howard as a faculty member. There, she joined a fiction workshop and began writing in earnest. Required to bring a sample to a workshop meeting, she began work on a story about a black girl who craves blue eyes — the kernel of her first novel. In 1958, she married Harold Morrison, an architect from Jamaica; they were divorced in 1964. In interviews, Ms. Morrison rarely spoke of the marriage, though she intimated that her husband had wanted a traditional 1950s wife — and that, she could never be. Video TRANSCRIPT 0:00/3:43 Toni Morrison: ‘I Know How to Write Forever’ The Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, known for “Song of Solomon” and “Beloved,” died at 88. We interviewed her in 2015. Watch as she reads from her novel, “God Help the Child.” “I know how to write forever. I don’t think I could have happily stayed here in the world if I did not have a way of thinking about it, which is what writing is for me. It’s control. Nobody tells me what to do. It’s mine. It’s free and it’s — it’s a way of thinking. It’s pure knowledge.” Reporter: “This would be —” “Ready? ‘God Help the Child.’ Book narration: It’s not my fault, so you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and I have no idea how it happened. It didn’t take more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs to realize something was wrong. Really wrong. She was so black. She scared me. Yeah, I wanted to focus in this book about the confusion there is about race. This girl is abused by her mother because she’s born really black. So I wandered her journey to be about becoming a three-dimensional human being. I didn’t discover why I wrote until later. I came at it as not a writer, but a reader and such a story didn’t exist. Every little homely, black girl was a joke or didn’t exist in literature and I was eager to read about a story where racism really hurts and can destroy you. Book narration: I told her to call me ‘Sweetness’ instead of ‘Mother’ or ‘Mama.’ It was safer being that black and having what I think are two thick lips, calling me ‘Mama’ would confuse people. I even thought of giving her away to an orphanage someplace. And I was scared to be one of those mothers who put their babies on church steps. What I’ve learned to do and what I really feel proud about is being able to say more with less. Let the reader enter with his or her own imagination, and that makes us co-conspirators as it were, together, the reader and me. Book narration: Simply dumbstruck by her beauty. Booker stared open-mouthed at a young blue-black woman, standing at the curb laughing, her hair like a million black butterflies asleep on her head. He put the trumpet to his lips. What emerged was music he had never played before: low muted notes. Held long, too long, as the strains floated through drops of rain. Video player loading The Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, known for “Song of Solomon” and “Beloved,” died at 88. We interviewed her in 2015. Watch as she reads from her novel, “God Help the Child.”CreditCredit...Colin Archdeacon/The New York Times After her divorce, Ms. Morrison moved with her sons to Syracuse, where she took a job as an editor with a textbook division of Random House. A stranger in the city, she found herself achingly lonely. In the interstices between work and motherhood, she began turning her short story into “The Bluest Eye.” In the late 1960s, Ms. Morrison moved to New York City and took an editorial position with Random House’s trade-book division. Over the nearly two decades she held the post, her authors included Angela Davis, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara and Muhammad Ali. “I look very hard for black fiction because I want to participate in developing a canon of black work,” Ms. Morrison said in an interview quoted in The Dictionary of Literary Biography. “We’ve had the first rush of black entertainment, where blacks were writing for whites, and whites were encouraging this kind of self-flagellation. Now we can get down to the craft of writing, where black people are talking to black people.” One of the nonfiction projects on which she worked at Random House was “The Black Book,” published in 1974. Compiled by Ms. Morrison, the volume is a lavishly illustrated scrapbook spanning three centuries of African-American history, reproducing newspaper clippings, photographs, advertisements, handbills and the like. Researching the book, Ms. Morrison came across a 19th-century article about a fugitive slave named Margaret Garner who, on the point of recapture near Cincinnati, killed her infant daughter. More than a decade after “The Black Book” appeared, the story would become the armature of “Beloved.” A Letter and a Prize Critical response to “Beloved” was overwhelmingly positive, though not uniformly so. In a corrosive review in The New Republic, the African-American critic Stanley Crouch called it “a blackface holocaust novel,” adding: “The world exists in a purple haze of overstatement, of false voices, of strained homilies; nothing very subtle is ever really tried. ‘Beloved’ reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries.” Image Ms. Morrison in 2008, when she published her novel &ldquo;A Mercy,&rdquo; which dealt with slavery and servitude in the 17th century. Ms. Morrison in 2008, when she published her novel “A Mercy,” which dealt with slavery and servitude in the 17th century.Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times But the preponderance of opinion was on the other side. In January 1988, in the wake of the novel’s publication, The Times Book Review published an open letter signed by two dozen black writers, among them Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Arnold Rampersad and Alice Walker, lauding Ms. Morrison and protesting the fact that she had “yet to receive the keystone honors of the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize.” “Beloved” won the Pulitzer Prize that April. In 2006, after polling hundreds of writers, editors and critics, The Book Review named the novel the best American work of fiction of the previous quarter-century. Ms. Morrison’s fourth novel, “Tar Baby” (1981), deals explicitly with issues of racial and class prejudice among black people. Set on a Caribbean island, it chronicles the love affair of a cosmopolitan, European-educated black woman with a rough-and-tumble local man. Her other novels include “Jazz” (1992), set in 1920s New York; “A Mercy” (2008), which divorces the institution of slavery from ideas of race by setting the narrative in the 17th century, where servitude, black or white, was apt to be determined by class; and “Home” (2012), about a black Korean War veteran’s struggles on returning to the Jim Crow South. Ms. Morrison’s volumes of nonfiction include “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” (1992) and “What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction” (2008, edited by Carolyn C. Denard). [Read Toni Morrison’s writing on black feminism, Disneyland and more.] She wrote the libretto for “Margaret Garner,” an opera by Richard Danielpour that received its world premiere at the Detroit Opera House in 2005 with the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves in the title role. In 1989, Ms. Morrison joined the faculty of Princeton, where she taught courses in the humanities and African American studies, and was a member of the creative writing program. She went on emeritus status in 2006. Ms. Morrison is survived by her son Harold Ford Morrison and three grandchildren. Another son, Slade, with whom she collaborated on the texts of many books for children, died in 2010. Her other laurels include the National Humanities Medal in 2000 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented in 2012 by President Barack Obama. The Toni Morrison Society, devoted to the study of her life and work, was founded in 1993. If there is a unifying thread running through Ms. Morrison’s writing, it is perhaps nowhere more vivid than in “Song of Solomon.” At novel’s end, after his odyssey through his ancestral past, Milkman has attained the knowledge that lets him situate himself within his family, the larger community and black America. And with that, on the book’s final page, he leaps into the air, taking symbolic flight over a world in which he has found his place at last.
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