Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison in 2008
Born	February 18, 1931 (1931-02-18) (age 79) Lorain, Ohio, United States
Occupation	Novelist, editor
Genres	African American literature
Notable work(s)	Beloved, Song of Solomon
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1988
Influences James Baldwin, William Faulkner, Doris Lessing, Herman Melville
Influenced Bell Hooks , Octavia Butler
Signature

Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford^[1] on February 18, 1931) is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed black characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved.

Early life and career

Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio to George and Ramah (Willis) Wofford, the second of four children in a working-class family.^[2] As a child, Morrison read constantly; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. Morrison's father told her numerous folktales of the black community (a method of storytelling that would later work its way into Morrison's writings).^[3]

In 1949 Morrison entered Howard University to study English. Morrison received a B.A. in English from Howard in 1953, then earned a Master of Arts degree, also in English, from Cornell University in 1955, for which she wrote a thesis on suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf ^[4]. After graduation, Morrison became an English instructor at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas (from 1955–57) then returned to Howard to teach English. She became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.

In 1958 she married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect and fellow faculty member at Howard University. They had two children, Harold and Slade, and divorced in 1964. After the divorce she moved to Syracuse, New York, where she worked as a textbook editor. A year and a half later she went to work as an editor at the New York City headquarters of Random House.^[4]

As an editor Morrison played an important role in bringing black literature into the mainstream. She edited books by such authors as Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis and Gayl Jones.^[5]

Writing career

Toni Morrison at the Miami Book Fair International of 1986

Morrison began writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard University who met to discuss their work. She went to one meeting with a short story about a black girl who longed to have blue eyes. The story later evolved into her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), which she wrote while raising two children and teaching at Howard.^[4] In 2000 it was chosen as a selection for Oprah's Book Club.^[6]

In 1975 her novel Sula (1973) was nominated for the National Book Award. Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), brought her national attention. The book was 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. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 1987 Morrison's novel Beloved became a critical success. When the novel failed to win the National Book Award as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, a number of writers protested over the omission.^[4][7] Shortly afterward, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the American Book Award. Beloved was adapted into the 1998 film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. Morrison later used Margaret Garner's life story again in an opera, Margaret Garner, with music by Richard Danielpour. In May 2006, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best American novel published in the previous twenty-five years.

In 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her citation reads: Toni Morrison, "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." Shortly afterwards, a fire destroyed her Rockland County, New York home.^[2][8]

In 1996 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.^[9] Morrison's lecture, entitled "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations,"^[10] began with the aphorism, "Time, it seems, has no future," and cautioned against misuse of history to diminish expectations of the future.^[11]

Morrison was 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."^[12]

Although her novels typically concentrate on black women, Morrison does not identify her works as feminist.^[13] She has stated that she thinks "it's 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."^[13]

In addition to her novels, Morrison has also co-written books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison, who works as a painter and musician.

Later life

Morrison taught English at two branches of the State University of New York. In 1984 she was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University at Albany, The State University of New York. From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University.^[3]

Though based in the Creative Writing Program, Morrison did not regularly offer writing workshops to students after the late 1990s, a fact that earned her some criticism. Rather, she has conceived and developed the prestigious Princeton Atelier, a program that brings together talented students with critically acclaimed, world-famous artists. Together the students and the artists produce works of art that are presented to the public after a semester of collaboration. In her position at Princeton, Morrison used her insights to encourage not merely new and emerging writers, but artists working to develop new forms of art through interdisciplinary play and cooperation.

At its 1979 commencement ceremonies, Barnard College awarded her its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction. Oxford University awarded her an honorary Doctor of Letters degree in June 2005.

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." Inspired by her curatorship, Morrison returned to Princeton in Fall 2008 to lead a small seminar, also entitled "The Foreigner's Home."

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 novel, Agaat.[1]

She is currently a member of the editorial board of The Nation magazine.

Politics

In writing about the impeachment in 1998, Morrison wrote that, since Whitewater, Bill Clinton had been mistreated because of his "Blackness":

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.^[14]

The phrase "our first Black president" was adopted as a positive by Bill Clinton supporters such as on September 29, 2001, when the Congressional Black Caucus honored the former president at its Dinner in Washington D.C., with the chair, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), telling the audience that Clinton "took so many initiatives he made us think for a while we had elected the first black president."^[15].

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."^[16] In the Democratic primary contest for the 2008 presidential race, Morrison endorsed Senator Barack Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton,^[17] though expressing admiration and respect for the latter.^[18]

Works

Toni Morrison, on jacket of her Pulitzer Prize winning novel Beloved.

Novels

• The Bluest Eye (1970; ISBN 0-452-28706-5)
• Sula (1974; ISBN 1-4000-3343-8)
• Song of Solomon (1977; ISBN 1-4000-3342-X)
• Tar Baby (1981; ISBN 1-4000-3344-6)
• Beloved (1987; ISBN 1-4000-3341-1)
• Jazz (1992; ISBN 1-4000-7621-8)
• Paradise (1999; ISBN 0-679-43374-0)
• Love (2003; ISBN 0-375-40944-0)
• A Mercy (2008; ISBN 978-0-307-26423-7)

Children's literature (with Slade Morrison)

• The Big Box (1999)
• The Book of Mean People (2002)

Short fiction

• "Recitatif" (1983)

Plays

• Dreaming Emmett (performed 1986)

Libretti

• Margaret Garner (first performed May 2005)

Non-fiction

• The Black Book (1974)
• Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)
• Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (editor) (1992)
• Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case (co-editor) (1997)
• Remember: The Journey to School Integration (April 2004)
• What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn C. Denard (April 2008)

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.

Awards and nominations

Awards

• 1977 National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon
• 1977 American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award
• 1987-88 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award^[19]
• 1988 American Book Award for Beloved
• 1988 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations for Beloved
• 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved
• 1989 MLA Commonwealth Award in Literature
• 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature
• 1993 Commander of the Arts and Letters, Paris
• 1994 Condorcet Medal, Paris
• 1994 Pearl Buck Award
• 1994 Rhegium Julii Prize for Literature
• 1996 Jefferson Lecture
• 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
• 2000 National Humanities Medal
• UUA:Frederic G. Melcher Book Award (named for an editor of Publishers Weekly), 1988 for "Beloved". 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 approximately 40 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to British North America.
• In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Toni Morrison on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.^[20]

Nominations

• Grammy Awards 2008 Best Spoken Word Album for Children - "Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?"

See also

• American Literature
• African American literature
• Black Nobel Prize laureates
• List of female Nobel laureates
• Good Hair (African American Usage)

References

External links

• Toni Morrison's oral history video excerpts at The National Visionary Leadership Project
• Literary Encyclopedia biography
• Voices from the Gaps biography
• The Nobel Prize in Literature 1993
• Toni Morrison at Random House Australia
• Review of A Mercy - Centre for Public Christianity