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1. Harold Ford Morrison
2. Facts About Toni Morrison
3. Toni Morrison Website
4. Toni Morrison Biography Prezi

In contrast, Morrison's mother, Ramah, a more educated, trusting person than her husband, was a gentler, less confrontational parent to young Chloe Anthony Wofford, who would become world-renowned Toni Morrison, 1993 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Toni Morrison (February 18, 1931, to August 5, 2019) was an American novelist, editor, and educator whose novels focused on the experience of black Americans, particularly emphasizing black women's experience in an unjust society and the search for cultural identity. The Nobel Prize in Literature 1993 was awarded to Toni Morrison 'who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality'.

Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford;^[2] February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, and professor emeritus at Princeton University. 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, she won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for Beloved (1987).

Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 and went to graduate school at Cornell University. She later taught English at Howard University and also married and had two children before divorcing in 1964. In the late 1960s, she became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City. In the 1970s and 1980s, she developed her own reputation as an author, and her perhaps most celebrated work, Beloved, was made into a 1998 film.

Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.^[3] In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Also that year, she was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. On May 29, 2012, President Barack Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

• 1Life and career
• 2Politics, literary reception and legacy
• 4Awards and nominations
• 5Bibliography

Life and career[edit]

Early years[edit]

Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford. She was the second of four children in a working-class, African-American family.^[4] Her mother was born in Greenville, Alabama, and moved north with her family as a child. Her father grew up in Cartersville, Georgia, and when he was about 15, white people lynched two black businessmen who lived on his street. Morrison said: 'He never told us that he'd seen bodies. But he had seen them. And that was too traumatic, I think, for him.'^[5] 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. Ramah Wofford was a homemaker and a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.^[6]

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 pay the 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.'^[7]

Morrison's parents instilled in her a sense of heritage and language through telling traditional African-American folktales and ghost stories and singing songs.^[6][8] Morrison also read frequently as a child; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy.^[9] 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.^[10] Attending Lorain High School, she was on the debating team, the yearbook staff, and in the drama club.^[6]

Adulthood and editing career: 1949–1974[edit]

In 1949, she enrolled at the historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C., seeking the company of fellow black intellectuals.^[11] It was while at Howard that she encountered racially segregated restaurants and buses for the first time.^[5] 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.'^[12] She taught English, first at Texas Southern University in Houston for two years, then at Howard University for seven years. While teaching at Howard, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. She was pregnant with their second son when she and Harold divorced in 1964.^[8][13]

After the breakup of her marriage, Morrison began working as an editor in 1965, for L. W. Singer, a textbook division of publisher Random House,^[6] 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.^[14][15]

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 and Chinua Achebe and South African playwright Athol Fugard.^[6] She fostered a new generation of African-American authors,^[6] including Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, Black Panther Huey Newton^[16] and Gayl Jones, whose writing Morrison discovered, and she brought out the autobiography of boxer Muhammad Ali in The Greatest. She also published and publicized the work of Henry Dumas,^[17] a little-known novelist and poet who was shot to death by a transit officer in the New York City Subway in 1968.^[5][18]

Among other books Morrison developed and edited is The Black Book (1999), an anthology of photographs, illustrations, essays, and other documents of black life in the United States from the time of slavery to the 1920s.^[5] Random House had been uncertain about the project, but it received good reviews. Alvin Beam reviewed it for the ClevelandPlain 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.'^[6]

First writings and teaching, 1970–1986[edit]

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 alone.^[13]

The Bluest Eye was published (by Holt, Rinehart and Winston) in 1970, when Morrison was aged 39.^[15] 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.'^[19] 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.^[20] The book also brought Morrison to the attention of the acclaimed editor Robert Gottlieb at Knopf, an imprint of the publisher Random House. Gottlieb would go on to edit most of Morrison's novels.^[20]

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.^[21]Song of Solomon also won the National Book Critics Circle Award.^[22]

At its 1979 commencement ceremonies, Barnard College awarded to Morrison its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction.^[23]

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.^[24]

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.^[25][26] She taught English at two branches of the State University of New York (SUNY) and at Rutgers University's New Brunswick campus.^[27] In 1984, she was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University at Albany, SUNY.^[28]

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.^[29] Morrison was also a visiting professor at Bard College from 1986 to 1988.^[30]

The Beloved Trilogy and the Nobel Prize: 1987–1998[edit]

In 1987, Morrison published her most celebrated novel, Beloved. It was inspired by the true story of an enslaved African-American woman, Margaret Garner,^[31] 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.^[32] Morrison's novel imagines the dead baby returning as a ghost, Beloved, to haunt her mother and family.^[33]

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.'^[34] 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.'^[35] Not all critics praised Beloved, however. African-American conservative social critic Stanley Crouch, for instance, complained in his review in The New Republic^[36] 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.'^[37][38] 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,^[39][40] among them Maya Angelou, protested the omission in a statement that The New York Times published on January 24, 1988.^[15][41][42] '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.^[5] Two months later, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.^[34] It also won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.^[43]

Beloved is the first of three novels about love and African-American history, sometimes called the Beloved Trilogy.^[44] 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.'^[7] 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.^[43]

Before Morrison published the third novel of the trilogy, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Her citation reads that she, 'who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.'^[45] She was the first black woman of any nationality to win the prize.^[46] In her Nobel acceptance speech, 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.'^[47]

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.'^[48] Morrison's lecture, entitled 'The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations,'^[49] began with the aphorism: 'Time, it seems, has no future.' She cautioned against the misuse of history to diminish expectations of the future.^[50] 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.'^[51]

The third novel of her Beloved trilogy, Paradise, about citizens of an all-black town, came out in 1997. The next 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.^[52]

Beloved onscreen and 'the Oprah effect'[edit]

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.^[53]

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.'^[54] Film critic Janet Maslin, however, in her 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.'^[55]

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.^[56] An average of 13 million viewers watched the show's book club segments.^[57] As a result, when Winfrey selected Morrison's earliest novel The Bluest Eye in 2000, it sold another 800,000 paperback copies.^[6] 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.'^[58]

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.^[59] 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.'^[57] Morrison called the book club a 'reading revolution.'^[57]

The early 21st century[edit]

Morrison continued to explore new art forms when she 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 performed by the New York City Opera in 2007.^[60] Meanwhile, Love, her first novel since Paradise, came out in 2003. In 2004, Morrison 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.^[61]

From 1997 to 2003, Morrison was an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.^[62]

In June 2005, the University of Oxford awarded Morrison an honoraryDoctor of Letters degree.^[63] In the fall of that year, 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.'^[64]

In 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.^[65] 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.'^[66]

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.'^[67]

Princeton years[edit]

From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University.^[9] 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.^[11]

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.^[68]

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.'^[14]

On November 17, 2017, Princeton University dedicated Morrison Hall (a building previously called West College) in her honor.^[69]

Final years: 2010–2019[edit]

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.^[70]

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.^[20][71] Morrison's novel Home was half-completed when her son died.^[20]

In May 2011, Morrison received an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Rutgers University–New Brunswick during the commencement ceremony,^[72] where she delivered a speech on the 'pursuit of life, liberty, meaningfulness, integrity, and truth.'

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.^[14][11][73]

Morrison had stopped working on her latest novel when her son died. She said that afterward, '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 ..?'^[74]

She completed Home and dedicated it to her son Slade Morrison.^[10][75][76] 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.^[77]

In August 2012, Oberlin College became the home base of the Toni Morrison Society,^[78] an international literary society founded in 1983, dedicated to scholarly research of Morrison's work.^[79][80][81]

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.^[82]

Morrison was a member of the editorial advisory board of The Nation, a magazine started in 1865 by Northern abolitionists.^[83][61]

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][84][85]

Upon her death, Morrison had a net worth of 20 million dollars.^[86]

Politics, literary reception and legacy[edit]

Politics[edit]

Morrison was not afraid to comment on American politics and race relations.

In writing about the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton, Morrison 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.^[87]

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.'^[88]

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.'^[89] In the Democratic primary contest for the 2008 presidential race, Morrison endorsed Senator Barack Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton,^[90] though expressing admiration and respect for the latter.^[91] 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.'^[10]

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.'^[92]

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.^[93][94]

Relationship to feminism[edit]

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.'^[95] 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.'^[95]

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.'^[77]

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.'^[96]

National Memorial for Peace and Justice[edit]

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, includes writing by Morrison.^[97] Visitors can see her quote after they have walked through the section commemorating individual victims of lynching.^[98]

Papers[edit]

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.^[99][100] 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.^[101]

Documentary films[edit]

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.^{[102][103][104]}

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.^[105] The film's executive producer was Jonathan Demme. It was directed by Oberlin College Cinema Studies faculty Geoff Pingree and Rian Brown,^[106] and incorporates footage shot by Morrison's first-born son Harold Ford Morrison, who also consulted on the film.^[107]

In 2019, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.^[108] People featured in the film include Morrison, Angela Davis, Oprah Winfrey, Sonia Sanchez, and Walter Mosley, among others.^[109]

Awards and nominations[edit]

Awards[edit]

• 1975: Ohioana Book Award for Sula^[110]
• 1977: National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon^[111]
• 1977: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award^[112]
• 1987–88: Robert F. Kennedy Book Award^[113]
• 1988: Helmerich Award^[114]
• 1988: American Book Award for Beloved^[115]
• 1988: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations for Beloved^[116]
• 1988: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved^[34]
• 1988: Frederic G. Melcher Book Award for Beloved^[117][a]
• 1988: Ohioana Career Medal for contributions to education, literature, and the humanities^[110]
• 1988: Honorary Doctor of Laws at University of Pennsylvania^[120][121]
• 1989: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Harvard University^[122]
• 1993: Nobel Prize in Literature^[123]
• 1993: Commander of the Arts and Letters, Paris^[99]
• 1994: Condorcet Medal, Paris^[124]
• 1994: Rhegium Julii Prize for Literature^[125]
• 1996: Jefferson Lecture^[126]
• 1996: National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters^[127]
• 1997: Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Gustavus Adolphus College.^[128]
• 2000: National Humanities Medal^[129]
• 2002: 100 Greatest African Americans, list by Molefi Kete Asante^[130]
• 2005: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from University of Oxford^[131]
• 2008: New Jersey Hall of Fame inductee^[132]
• 2009: Norman Mailer Prize, Lifetime Achievement^[133]
• 2010: Officier de la Légion d'Honneur^[134]
• 2010: Institute for Arts and Humanities Medal for Distinguished Contributions to the Arts and Humanities from the Pennsylvania State University^[135]
• 2011: Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction^[136]
• 2011: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Rutgers University Graduation Commencement^[137]
• 2011: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Geneva^[138][139]
• 2012: Presidential Medal of Freedom^[140]
• 2013: The Nichols-Chancellor's Medal awarded by Vanderbilt University^[141]
• 2013: Honorary Doctorate of Literature awarded by Princeton University^[142]
• 2013: PEN Oakland - Josephine Miles Literary Award for Home
• 2014: Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award given by the National Book Critics Circle^[143][144]
• 2016: PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction^[145][146]
• 2016: The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry (The Norton Lectures), Harvard University^[147]
• 2016: The Edward MacDowell Medal, awarded by the MacDowell Colony^[148]
• 2018: The Thomas Jefferson Medal, awarded by The American Philosophical Society^[149]

Nominations[edit]

• 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?^[150]

Bibliography[edit]

Novels[edit]

• The Bluest Eye. 1970. ISBN0-452-28706-5.
• Sula. 1973. ISBN1-4000-3343-8.
• Song of Solomon. 1977. ISBN1-4000-3342-X.
• Tar Baby. 1981. ISBN1-4000-3344-6.
• Beloved. 1987. ISBN1-4000-3341-1.
• Jazz. 1992. ISBN1-4000-7621-8.
• Paradise. 1997. ISBN0-679-43374-0.
• Love. 2003. ISBN0-375-40944-0.
• A Mercy. 2008. ISBN978-0-307-26423-7.
• Home. 2012. ISBN0307594165.
• God Help the Child. 2015. ISBN0307594173.

Children's literature (with Slade Morrison)[edit]

• The Big Box (1999). ISBN9780786823642.
• The Book of Mean People (2002). ISBN9780786805402.
• Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper?, The Lion or the Mouse?, Poppy or the Snake? (2007). ISBN9780743283915.
• Peeny Butter Fudge (2009). ISBN9781442459007.
• Please, Louise (2014). ISBN9781416983385.

Short fiction[edit]

• 'Recitatif' (1983)^[151]
• 'Sweetness'. The New Yorker. 90 (47): 58–61. February 9, 2015.

Plays[edit]

• Dreaming Emmett (performed 1986)^[29]
• Desdemona (first performed May 15, 2011, in Vienna)^{[152][153][154]}

Libretto[edit]

• Margaret Garner (first performed May 2005)^[60]

Non-fiction[edit]

• Morrison, Toni (2009). 'Foreword'. In Harris, Middleton A.; Levitt, Morris; Furman, Roger; Smith, Ernest (eds.). The Black Book. Random House. ISBN9781400068487.
• Editor (July 24, 2007). Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN9780307388636.
• Editor and foreword (1992). Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. Pantheon Books. ISBN9780679741459.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
• Co-editor (1997), Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case. ISBN9780307482266.
• Remember: The Journey to School Integration (April 2004). ISBN9780618397402.
• What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn C. Denard (April 2008). ISBN9781604730173.
• Editor (2009), Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word. ISBN9780061878817.
• The Origin of Others – The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures; Foreword by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017). Harvard University Press. ISBN9780674976450.
• The Source of Self-Regard: Essays, Speeches, Meditations (2019). New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN9780525521037. UK edition published as Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations (2019), London: Chatto & Windus, ISBN978-1784742850.

Articles[edit]

• '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.

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

1. ^A remark in her acceptance speech that 'there is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby' honoring the memory of the human beings forced into slavery and brought to the United States; 'There's no small bench by the road,' led the Toni Morrison Society to begin installing benches at significant sites in the history of slavery in America; the first 'bench by the road' was dedicated July 26, 2008, on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, the point of entry for about 40 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to British North America.^[118][119]

References[edit]

1. ^'Toni Morrison Fast Facts'. CNN. August 8, 2019. Retrieved August 8, 2019.
2. ^Duvall, John N. (2000). The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 38. ISBN978-0-312-23402-7. After all the published biographical information on Morrison agrees that her full name is Chloe Anthony Wofford, so that the adoption of 'Toni' as a substitute for 'Chloe' still honors her given name, if somewhat w. Morrison's middle name, however, was not Anthony; her birth certificate indicates her full name as Chloe Ardelia Wofford, which reveals that Ramah and George Wofford named their daughter for her maternal grandmother, Ardelia Willis.
3. ^ ^abFox, Margalit (August 6, 2019). 'Toni Morrison, Towering Novelist of the Black Experience, Dies at 88'. The New York Times. Retrieved August 6, 2019.
4. ^Dreifus, Claudia (September 11, 1994). 'Chloe Wofford Talks About Toni Morrison'. The New York Times. Archived from the original on September 11, 1994. Retrieved June 11, 2007.
5. ^ ^abcdeGhansah, Rachel Kaadzi (April 8, 2015). 'The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison'. The New York Times. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
6. ^ ^abcdefgh'How Toni Morrison Fostered a Generation of Black Writers'. The New Yorker. October 27, 2003. Retrieved May 1, 2017.
7. ^ ^abStreitfeld, David (October 8, 1993). 'The Laureates's Life Song'. The Washington Post. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
8. ^ ^ab'Tony Morrison'. Contemporary Popular Writers. Ed. Dave Mote. Detroit: St. James Press, 1997.
9. ^ ^abLarson, Susan (April 11, 2007). 'Awaiting Toni Morrison'. The Times-Picayune. Archived from the original on September 30, 2007. Retrieved June 11, 2007.
10. ^ ^abcBrockes, Emma (April 13, 2012). 'Toni Morrison: 'I want to feel what I feel. Even if it's not happiness''. The Guardian. Retrieved February 14, 2013.
11. ^ ^abcCummings, Pip (August 7, 2015). ''I didn't want to come back': Toni Morrison on life, death and Desdemona'. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved May 3, 2017.
12. ^Wofford, Chloe Ardellia (September 1955). Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's Treatment of the Alienated. Cornell University. Retrieved March 5, 2016.
13. ^ ^abHoby, Hermione (April 25, 2015). 'Toni Morrison: 'I'm writing for black people .. I don't have to apologise''. The Guardian. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
14. ^ ^abc'Toni Morrison Biography', Bio.com. Retrieved October 31, 2015.
15. ^ ^abcGrimes, William (October 8, 1993). 'Toni Morrison Is '93 Winner of Nobel Prize in Literature'. The New York Times. Retrieved June 11, 2007.
16. ^'Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison dies at 88'. ABC News. August 7, 2019. Retrieved August 7, 2019.
17. ^Morrison, Toni (Summer 1988). 'On behalf of Henry Dumas'. Black American Literature Forum. 22 (2): 310–312. doi:10.2307/2904523. ISSN0148-6179. JSTOR2904523.
18. ^Verdelle, A. J. (February 1998). 'Paradise found: a talk with Toni Morrison about her new novel – Nobel Laureate's new book, 'Paradise' – Interview'. Essence. Archived from the original on August 11, 2013. Retrieved June 11, 2007.
19. ^Leonard, John (November 13, 1970). 'Books of The Times'. The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 13, 1970. Retrieved August 12, 2019.
20. ^ ^abcdKachka, Boris (April 27, 2012). 'Who Is the Author of Toni Morrison?'. New York. Retrieved August 7, 2019.
21. ^Busby, Margaret, 'Books: Toni Morrison: beloved and all that jazz ..', The Independent, October 9, 1993.
22. ^'All Past National Book Critics Circle Award Winners and Finalists'. bookcritics.org. National Book Critics Circle. Retrieved August 6, 2019.
23. ^'Columbia Daily Spectator May 18, 2005'. Columbia Spectator. Columbia University Libraries. Retrieved August 6, 2019.
24. ^Hoby, Hermione (April 25, 2015). 'Toni Morrison: 'I'm writing for black people .. I don't have to apologise''. The Guardian. Retrieved August 6, 2019.
25. ^'New York Home of Toni Morrison Burns'. The New York Times. December 26, 1993. p. 38. Retrieved August 6, 2019.
26. ^Jaggi, Maya (November 14, 2003). 'Solving the riddle'. The Guardian. Retrieved August 7, 2019.
27. ^Westenfeld, Adrienne (August 6, 2019). 'Toni Morrison's Monumental Impact on Literature and Culture Will Be Felt For Centuries to Come'. Esquire. Retrieved August 6, 2019.
28. ^Henry, David (August 6, 2019). 'Toni Morrison, First Black Woman Writer to Win Nobel, Dies'. Bloomberg. Retrieved August 6, 2019.
29. ^ ^abCroyden, Margaret (December 29, 1985). 'Toni Morrison Tries Her Hand At Playwriting'. The New York Times. Retrieved May 1, 2017.
30. ^Fultz 2003, p. xii.
31. ^Rothstein, Mervyn (August 26, 1987). 'Toni Morrison, In Her New Novel, Defends Women'. The New York Times. Retrieved June 20, 2016.
32. ^'Margaret Garner Incident (1856)'. Black Past. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
33. ^Mathieson, Barbara Offutt (1990). 'Memory and Mother Love in Morrison's 'Beloved''. American Imago. 47 (1): 1–21. ISSN0065-860X. JSTOR26303963.
34. ^ ^abcHevesi, Dennis (April 1, 1988). 'Toni Morrison's Novel 'Beloved' Wins the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction'. The New York Times. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
35. ^Atwood, Margaret (September 13, 1987). 'Jaunted By Their Nightmares'. The New York Times. Retrieved May 1, 2017.
36. ^Crouch, Stanley (October 19, 1987). 'Literary Conjure Woman'. The New Republic. Retrieved May 8, 2017.
37. ^Alexander, Amy (January 19, 1999). 'The bull in the black-intelligentsia china shop'. Salon. Retrieved May 8, 2017.
38. ^Gioia, Ted. 'Beloved by Toni Morrison'. thenewcanon.com. Retrieved May 8, 2017.
39. ^McDowell, Edwin (January 19, 1988). '48 Black Writers Protest By Praising Morrison'. The New York Times. Retrieved August 9, 2019.
40. ^''Writers Demand Recognition for Toni Morrison (1988)', June Jordan Houston A. Baker Jr. STATEMENT, reprinted at aalbc.com'. AALBC.com's Discussion Boards.
41. ^'Black Writers In Praise of Toni Morrison'. Book Review. The New York Times. April 8, 2018. Retrieved August 8, 2019.
42. ^Menand, Louis (December 26, 2005). 'All That Glitters – Literature's global economy'. The New Yorker. Retrieved June 11, 2007.
43. ^ ^ab'Beloved'. Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
44. ^'Toni Morrison Trilogy by Toni Morrison'. goodreads.com. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
45. ^'Toni Morrison – Facts'. nobelprize.org. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
46. ^Brockell, Gillian (August 6, 2019). 'Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize, a terrifying staircase and the king who rescued her'. The Washington Post. Retrieved August 6, 2019.
47. ^'Toni Morrison – Nobel Lecture'. nobelprize.org. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
48. ^Jefferson Lecturers at NEH Website (retrieved January 22, 2009).
49. ^Morrison, Toni, 'The Future of Time, Literature and Diminished Expectations,' reprinted in Toni Morrison, What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), ISBN978-1-60473-017-3, pp. 170–186.
50. ^Hawkins, B. Denise, 'Marvelous Morrison – Toni Morrison – Award-Winning Author Talks About the Future From Some Place in Time,'Archived May 12, 2012, at the Wayback MachineDiverse Online (formerly Black Issues in Higher Education), June 17, 2007.
51. ^'National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Presenter of National Book Awards'. Nationalbook.org. Retrieved May 30, 2012.
52. ^Corman, Josh (August 14, 2013). 'A Brief History of (Novelists on the Cover of) TIME'. BOOK RIOT. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
53. ^Ebert, Roger. 'Beloved Movie Review & Film Summary (1998)'. www.rogerebert.com. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
54. ^'Beloved it's not'. The Economist. November 19, 1998. ISSN0013-0613. Retrieved May 2, 2017.
55. ^Maslin, Janet (October 16, 1998). 'Film Review; No Peace From A Brutal Legacy'. The New York Times. Retrieved May 2, 2017.
56. ^'The Bluest Eye at Oprah's Book Club official page'. Oprah.com.
57. ^ ^abcLister, Rachel (2009). 'Toni Morrison and the Media'. Reading Toni Morrison. ABC-CLIO. p. 113. ISBN9780313354991.
58. ^Young, John K. (January 1, 2001). 'Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, and Postmodern Popular Audiences'. African American Review.
59. ^Berg, Madeline (August 3, 2016). 'With New Book Club Pick, Oprah's Still Got The Golden Touch'. Forbes. Retrieved May 2, 2017.
60. ^ ^abGurewitsch, Matthew (September 2, 2007). 'Singing the Lament of a Fugitive Slave'. The New York Times. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
61. ^ ^ab'Blues, Love and Politics,' A conversation between Toni Morrison and Cornel West'. The Nation. May 6, 2004. ISSN0027-8378. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
62. ^'All Professors at Large 1965 to June 30, 2023'. Cornell University. Retrieved June 8, 2018.
63. ^Morrison, Toni (2008). Toni Morrison: Conversations. University Press of Mississippi. p. xxiii. ISBN9781604730197.
64. ^'Honor! A Celebration of the African American Cultural Legacy – Festival Artists – Toni Morrison'. honor.carnegiehall.org. Retrieved August 6, 2019.
65. ^The New York Times (May 21, 2006). 'What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?'. The New York Times. Retrieved May 1, 2017.
66. ^Scott, A. O. (May 21, 2006). 'In Search of the Best'. The New York Times. Retrieved May 1, 2017.
67. ^Johnson, Diane (December 2008). 'Voice of America'. Vanity Fair. Retrieved May 1, 2017.
68. ^Gillespie, Carmen (January 1, 2007). Critical Companion to Toni Morrison: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work. Infobase Publishing. p. 377. ISBN9781438108575.
69. ^Dienst, Karin, 'Princeton dedicates Morrison Hall in honor of Nobel laureate and emeritus faculty member Toni Morrison', Princeton University, November 20, 2017.
70. ^Video of Toni Morrison and Marlene van Niekerk in Conversation with Anthony AppiahArchived October 5, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, May 1, 2010.
71. ^Claudette. 'About the Artist'. SladeMorrison.com. Archived from the original on April 30, 2011. Retrieved May 14, 2011.
72. ^'Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison to Speak, Receive Honorary Degree at Rutgers' 245th Commencement May 15', Rutgers Today, February 8, 2011.
73. ^Sciolino, Elaine (October 25, 2011). 'Toni Morrison's 'Desdemona' and Peter Sellars's 'Othello''. The New York Times. Retrieved May 3, 2017.
74. ^Bollen, Christopher (May 1, 2012). 'Toni Morrison'. Interview. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
75. ^Minzesheimer, Bob, 'New novel 'Home' brings Toni Morrison back to Ohio', USA Today, May 7, 2012.
76. ^Mitra, Ipshita, 'Toni Morrison builds a 'Home' we never knew', The Times of India, May 14, 2014.
77. ^ ^abBollen, Christopher (May 7, 2012). 'Toni Morrison'. Interview. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
78. ^'Society History', The Toni Morrison Society.
79. ^'Oberlin College Establishes Partnership with Toni Morrison Society'. Oberlin College. Retrieved May 2, 2017.
80. ^'Toni Morrison Society Celebrates 20 Years', Oberlin College, September 18, 2013.
81. ^'Morrison Society Office Dedicated', Library Perspectives (newsletter of the Oberlin College Library), Fall 2013, Issue No. 49, p. 5.
82. ^Gay, Roxane (April 29, 2015). 'God Help the Child by Toni Morrison review – 'incredibly powerful''. The Guardian. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
83. ^'Toni Morrison'. The Nation. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
84. ^Italie, Hillel (August 6, 2019). 'Nobel laureate Toni Morrison dead at 88'. AP NEWS. Retrieved August 6, 2019.
85. ^Lea, Richard; Cain, Sian (August 6, 2019). 'Toni Morrison, author and Nobel laureate, dies aged 88'. The Guardian. Retrieved August 6, 2019.
86. ^Staff, A. O. L. 'Toni Morrison, iconic author and activist, will leave behind an impressive net worth'. AOL.com.
87. ^Morrison, Toni (October 5, 1998). 'Talk of the Town: Comment'. The New Yorker.
88. ^'Congressional Black Caucus,'. Archived from the original on December 15, 2007. Retrieved May 24, 2017.CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link)CNSNews.com, October 2001.
89. ^Sachs, Andrea.'10 Questions for Toni Morrison', Time, May 7, 2008.
90. ^'Headlines for January 29, 2008 – Sen. Kennedy Compares Barack Obama to JFK'. Democracy Now!. January 29, 2008. Retrieved May 30, 2012.
91. ^Alexander, Elizabeth (January 28, 2008). 'Our first black president?'. Salon. Archived from the original on September 13, 2009. Retrieved August 9, 2019. It's worth remembering the context of Toni Morrison's famous phrase about Bill Clinton so we can retire it, now that Barack Obama is a contender
92. ^Wood, Gaby (April 19, 2015). 'Toni Morrison interview: on racism, her new novel and Marlon Brando'. The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved April 22, 2015.
93. ^Morrison, Toni (November 21, 2016). 'Mourning For Whiteness'. The New Yorker. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
94. ^Chasmar, Jessica. 'Toni Morrison: Decline of 'white superiority' scared Americans into electing Donald Trump'. The Washington Times. Retrieved May 1, 2017.
95. ^ ^abJaffrey, Zia (February 3, 1998). 'The Salon Interview - Toni Morrison'. Salon. Retrieved December 20, 2014.
96. ^Kottiswara, W. S. (2008). Postmodern Feminist Writers. New Dehli: Sarup & Sons. pp. 48–86.
97. ^'The National Memorial for Peace and Justice', EJI (Equal Justice Initiative).
98. ^Kennicott, Philip (April 24, 2018). 'A powerful memorial in Montgomery remembers the victims of lynching'. The Washington Post. Retrieved August 6, 2019.
99. ^ ^ab'Toni Morrison papers to reside at Princeton'. Princeton University Office of Communication. October 17, 2014.
100. ^Skemer, Don, 'Toni Morrison Papers open to students, scholars at Princeton University Library', Princeton University, June 8, 2016.
101. ^Branch, Chris (October 23, 2014). 'Do Toni Morrison's Papers Belong At Princeton or Howard?'. The Huffington Post. Retrieved August 7, 2019.
102. ^'Imagine .. – Summer 2015: 4. Toni Morrison Remembers', BBC One.
103. ^Mangan, Lucy (July 15, 2015). 'Imagine: Toni Morrison Remembers review – proof of a divine being'. The Guardian. Retrieved August 9, 2019.
104. ^'Newnhamite director makes BBC programme about Nobel laureate Toni Morrison'. Newnham College, University of Cambridge. July 16, 2015. Retrieved August 7, 2019.
105. ^'The Foreigner's Home, a Feature-Length Documentary Film on Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison 2017 by Photojournalist Lisa Pacino'. Under The Duvet Productions. January 25, 2017. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
106. ^'The Foreigner's Home'. Rian Brown. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
107. ^'Cinema Studies Faculty Make Documentary on Toni Morrison'. News Center. April 21, 2016. Archived from the original on April 21, 2016. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
108. ^Schager, Nick; Schager, Nick (January 29, 2019). 'Film Review: 'Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am''. Retrieved August 6, 2019.
109. ^Kikta, Lorry (April 14, 2019). 'Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am'. Film Threat. Retrieved August 6, 2019.
110. ^ ^ab'Past Award Winners – Ohioana Library'.
111. ^'National Book Critics Circle: awards'. www.bookcritics.org. Retrieved April 2, 2019.
112. ^Goulimari, Pelagia (March 29, 2012). Toni Morrison. Routledge. p. 26. ISBN9781136698682.
113. ^8th Annual RFK Book AwardArchived December 20, 2014, at the Wayback Machine. Robert F. Kennedy Center.
114. ^'Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award'. helmerichaward.org. Retrieved April 2, 2019.
115. ^'American Book Awards'. Before Columbus Foundation. Retrieved April 2, 2019.
116. ^'Winners by Year'. Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Retrieved April 2, 2019.
117. ^'Frederic G. Melcher Book Award'. UUA.org. December 4, 2014. Retrieved April 2, 2019.
118. ^'A bench by the road'. UU World Magazine. August 11, 2008. Retrieved April 2, 2019.
119. ^Lee, Felicia R. (July 28, 2008). 'Toni Morrison's on Sullivan's Island: A Bench of Memory at Slavery's Gateway'. The New York Times. Retrieved April 2, 2019.
120. ^'Almanac'(PDF). April 26, 1988. Retrieved August 12, 2019.
121. ^'Penn Honorary Degree Recipients'. Retrieved August 12, 2019.
122. ^'Honorary Degrees'. harvard.edu. Harvard University. Retrieved November 9, 2016. 1989 Benazir Bhutto, Toni Morrison LL.D.
123. ^'The Nobel Prize in Literature'. NobelPrize.org. Retrieved April 2, 2019.
124. ^Fultz, Lucille P. (2003). Toni Morrison: Playing with Difference. University of Illinois Press. p. xiii. ISBN9780252028236.
125. ^Matus, Jill L. (September 15, 1998). Toni Morrison. Manchester University Press. p. xiv. ISBN9780719044489.
126. ^'Toni Morrison to Deliver NEH's 1996 Jefferson Lecture'. The Chronicle of Higher Education. February 9, 1996. ISSN0009-5982. Retrieved April 2, 2019.
127. ^'National Book Foundation – DCAL Medal'. National Book Foundation. Retrieved April 2, 2019.
128. ^'Honorary Degrees - Nobel Conference'. Gustavus Adolphus College. Retrieved August 10, 2019.
129. ^'Toni Morrison'. National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Retrieved April 2, 2019.
130. ^Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. ISBN1-57392-963-8.
131. ^'Oxford University Gazette, February 10, 2005: University Agenda'Archived June 10, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, University of Oxford, February 2005.
132. ^'Toni Morrison'. New Jersey Hall of Fame. April 11, 2014. Retrieved April 2, 2019.
133. ^'Mailer Prize – The Norman Mailer Center'. Retrieved April 2, 2019.
134. ^'Toni Morrison reçoit la Légion d'honneur'. L'Express (in French). November 3, 2010. Retrieved August 6, 2019.
135. ^'Heard on Campus: Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison'. Penn State Today. April 11, 2010. Retrieved August 7, 2019.
136. ^'Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction Awarded to Don DeLillo'. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. Retrieved August 6, 2019.
137. ^'Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison to Speak, Receive Honorary Degree at Rutgers' 245th Commencement May 15'. Rutgers Today. February 8, 2011. Retrieved August 6, 2019.
138. ^'Dies Academicus 2011'Archived October 15, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, Service de communication, Université de Genève, October 2011.
139. ^Toni Morrison's 'Intervention'Archived March 4, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, Dies Academicus 2011, Université de Genève, October 14, 2011.
140. ^Clark, Lesley (May 29, 2012). 'Obama awards medals to Bob Dylan, Toni Morrison, others'. McClatchy Newspapers. Retrieved September 28, 2017.
141. ^Patterson, Jim (May 9, 2013). 'Novelist Morrison tells grads to embrace interconnectedness'. Vanderbilt News.
142. ^Dienst, Karin (June 4, 2013). 'Princeton awards six honorary degrees'. Princeton University news.
143. ^'National Book Critics Circle Announces Finalists for Publishing Year 2014'. National Book Critics Circle. January 19, 2015. Retrieved January 29, 2015.
144. ^Dove, Rita, 'Sandrof Award: Rita Dove's Homage to Toni Morrison', Critical Mass, March 15, 2015.
145. ^Galehouse, Maggie (March 1, 2016). 'PEN Literary Award winners announced'. Houston Chronicle. Retrieved March 2, 2016.
146. ^'2016 PEN Literary Award Winners'. PEN. March 1, 2016. Retrieved March 2, 2016.
147. ^'Norton Lectures'. Harvard.edu. Harvard University. Retrieved November 9, 2016. Harvard's preeminent lecture series in the arts and humanities, the Norton Lectures recognize individuals of extraordinary talent who, in addition to their particular expertise, have the gift of wide dissemination and wise expression. The term 'poetry' is interpreted in the broadest sense to encompass all poetic expression in language, music, or the fine arts. Past Norton Professors have included T.S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Leonard Bernstein, Czeslaw Milosz, John Cage, and Nadine Gordimer. The Norton Professor in 2016 is Toni Morrison
148. ^'Toni Morrison wins MacDowell medal for lifetime achievement'. The Boston Globe. Associated Press. April 8, 2016. Retrieved December 27, 2017.
149. ^'2018 Jefferson Medal'. American Philosophical Society. Retrieved April 6, 2019.
150. ^'The Complete List of Grammy Nominees'. The New York Times. December 6, 2007. Retrieved August 6, 2019.
151. ^Benjamin, Shanna Greene (May 14, 2013). 'The Space that Race Creates: An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison's 'Recitatif''. Studies in American Fiction. 40 (1): 87–106. doi:10.1353/saf.2013.0004. ISSN2158-5806.
152. ^'Wiener Festwochen: Desdemona'. Festwochen.at. Archived from the original on March 18, 2012. Retrieved May 30, 2012.
153. ^Thiessen, Erin Russell (May 26, 2011). 'Toni Morrison's Desdemona delivers a haunting, powerful 're-membering''. Retrieved October 20, 2011.
154. ^Winn, Steven (October 20, 2011). 'Toni Morrison adds twist to 'Desdemona''. Retrieved October 21, 2011.

External links[edit]

• Schappell, Elissa; Lacour, Claudia Brodsky (Fall 1993). 'Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134'. The Paris Review (128).
• Bookworm Interviews (Audio) with Michael Silverblatt
• Toni Morrison's oral history video excerpts at The National Visionary Leadership Project
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Toni Morrison on Charlie Rose
• Toni Morrison on IMDb
• 'Toni Morrison collected news and commentary'. The Guardian.
• 'Toni Morrison collected news and commentary'. The New York Times.
• Works by or about Toni Morrison in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Works by Toni Morrison at Open Library
• Toni Morrison Society based at Oberlin College
• Toni Morrison 'Reading the Writing: A Conversation with Toni Morrison' (Cornell University video, March 7, 2013)

Toni Morrison (February 18, 1931, to August 5, 2019) was an American novelist, editor, and educator whose novels focused on the experience of black Americans, particularly emphasizing black women's experience in an unjust society and the search for cultural identity. In her writing, she artfully used fantasy and mythical elements along with realistic depictions of racial, gender and class conflict. In 1993, she became the first African American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Harold Ford Morrison

Fast Facts: Toni Morrison

• Known For: American novelist, editor, and educator
• Also Known As: Chloe Anthony Wofford (given name at birth)
• Born: February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio
• Died: August 5, 2019 in The Bronx, New York City (pneumonia)
• Parents: Ramah and George Wofford
• Education: Howard University (BA), Cornell University (MA)
• Noted Works:The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise
• Key Awards: Pulitzer Prize for fiction (1987), Nobel Prize in Literature (1993), Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012)
• Spouse: Harold Morrison
• Children: sons Harold Ford Morrison, Slade Morrison
• Notable Quote: “If you’re going to hold someone down you’re going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.”

Along with the Nobel Prize, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for her 1987 novel Beloved, and in 1996, she was selected for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. government’s highest honor for achievement in the humanities. On May 29, 2012, she was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.

Early Life, Education, and Teaching Career

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, on February 18, 1931, to Ramah and George Wofford. Growing up during the economic hardship of the Great Depression, Morrison’s father, a former sharecropper, worked at three jobs to support the family. It was from her family that Morrison inherited her deep appreciation for all aspects of black culture.

Morrison earned Bachelor of Arts degrees from Howard University in 1952 and a Master's degree from Cornell University in 1955. After college, she changed her first name to Toni and taught at Texas Southern University until 1957. From 1957 to 1964, she taught at Howard University, where she married Jamaican architect Harold Morrison. Before divorcing in 1964, the couple had two sons together, Harold Ford Morrison and Slade Morrison. Among her students at Howard were future Civil Rights Movement leader Stokely Carmichael and Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land.

In 1965, Toni Morrison went to work as an editor at book publisher Random House, becoming the first black woman senior editor in the fiction department in 1967. After returning to teaching at State University of New York at Albany from 1984 to 1989, she taught at Princeton University until she retired in 2006.

AMCap Latest Version!. Amcap camera driver.

Writing Career

While working as a senior editor at Random House, Morrison also started sending her own manuscripts to publishers. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970 when Morrison was 39. Bluest Eye told the story of a victimized young black girl whose obsession with her idea of white beauty drove her longing for blue eyes. Her second novel, Sula, depicting the friendship between two black women, was published in 1973, while she was teaching at State University of New York.

While teaching at Yale in 1977, Morrison’s third novel, Song of Solomon, was published. The book gained critical and popular acclaim, winning the 1977 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Her next novel, Tar Baby, exploring the conflicts of race, class, and sex, was published in 1981 and led to her being accepted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Morrison’s first play, Dreaming Emmett, about the 1955 lynching of black teenager Emmett Till, premiered in 1986.

Published in 1987, Morrison’s most celebrated novel, Beloved, was inspired by the life story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved African American woman. Remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for 25 weeks, Beloved won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 1998, Beloved was made into a feature film starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover.

The second book in what Morrison called her “Beloved trilogy,” Jazz, came out in 1992. Written in a style imitating the rhythms of jazz music, Jazz depicts a love triangle during New York City’s Harlem Renaissance period of the 1920s. Critical acclaim from Jazz resulted in Morrison becoming the first African American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Published in 1997, the third book of Morrison’s Beloved trilogy, Paradise, focuses on the citizens of a fictional all-black town.

In suggesting that Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise should be read together as a trilogy, Morrison explained, “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.”

In her 1993 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Morrison explained the source of her inspiration to depict the black experience by telling the story of an old, blind, black woman who is confronted by a group of black teenagers who ask 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.”

Final Years and the Writing of 'Home'

Facts About Toni Morrison

In her later life, Morrison wrote children’s books with her younger son, Slade Morrison, a painter and a musician. When Slade died of pancreatic cancer in December 2010, one of Morrison’s final novels, Home, was half-completed. She said at the time, “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 . . . ?’”

Morrison did “keep on going” and finished Home, dedicating it to Slade. Published in 2012, Home tells the story of a black Korean War veteran living in the segregated United States of the 1950s, who fights to save his sister from brutal medical experiments performed on her by a racist white doctor.

In a 2008 interview with NPR’s Michel Martin, Morrison addressed the future of racism: “Racism will disappear when [it is] no longer profitable and no longer psychologically useful. When that happens, it’ll be gone.” Steinberg cubase free.

Today, Oberlin College, in Oberlin, Ohio, is the home of the Toni Morrison Society, an international literary society dedicated to teaching, reading, and researching the works of Toni Morrison.

Toni Morrison Website

Toni Morrison died at age 88 from complications of pneumonia at the Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, New York City, on August 5, 2019.

Updated by Robert Longley

Toni Morrison Biography Prezi

• .”Toni Morrison Fast Facts“ CNN Library. (August 6, 2019).
• Duvall, John N. (2000). “.”The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-312-23402-7.
• Fox, Margalit (August 6, 2019). “.”Toni Morrison, Towering Novelist of the Black Experience, Dies at 88 The New York Times.
• Ghansah, Rachel Kaadzi (April 8, 2015). “.”The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331.
• .”Ghosts in the House: How Toni Morrison Fostered a Generation of Black Writers“ The New Yorker. October 27, 2003.