SATA

1. Goodness and the literary imagination LCCN 2019948569 Type of material Book Personal name Morrison, Toni, author. Main title Goodness and the literary imagination / Toni Morrison, Davíd Carrasco, Stephanie Paulsell, Mara Willard. Published/Produced Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2019. Projected pub date 1909 Description pages cm ISBN 9780813943626 (cloth) (ebook) CALL NUMBER Not available Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. The source of self-regard : selected essays, speeches, and meditations LCCN 2018024415 Type of material Book Personal name Morrison, Toni, author. Uniform title Works. Selections Main title The source of self-regard : selected essays, speeches, and meditations / Toni Morrison. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. Projected pub date 1902 Description 1 online resource. ISBN 9780525521112 (Ebook) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 3. The origin of others LCCN 2017019077 Type of material Book Personal name Morrison, Toni, author. Main title The origin of others / Toni Morrison. Published/Produced Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2017. Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm. ISBN 9780674976450 (alk. paper) CALL NUMBER Not available Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 4. Please, Louise LCCN 2012026303 Type of material Book Personal name Morrison, Toni. Main title Please, Louise / Toni Morrison & Slade Morrison ; illustrated by Shadra Strickland. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created New York : Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, c2014. Description 1 v. (unpaged) : col. ill. ; 26 cm. ISBN 9781416983385 (hardcover : alk. paper) 9781442433106 (ebook) CALL NUMBER PZ7.M845147 Ple 2014 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 5. God help the child LCCN 2014034972 Type of material Book Personal name Morrison, Toni. Main title God help the child / Toni Morrison. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2015. Description 178 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780307594174 (hardcover : acid-free paper) 9780307740922 (softcover : acid-free paper) CALL NUMBER PS3563.O8749 G63 2015 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 6. Home LCCN 2011043441 Type of material Book Personal name Morrison, Toni. Main title Home / Toni Morrison. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. Description 145 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 9780307594167 (hbk.) 0307594165 (hbk.) Shelf Location FLS2013 006676 CALL NUMBER PS3563.O8749 H66 2012 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) CALL NUMBER PS3563.O8749 H66 2012 LANDOVR Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• The Lion or the Mouse? (2) (Who's Got Game?) - 2014 Scribner, New York, NY
• Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations - 2019 Chatto & Windus, New York, NY

• Fantastic Fiction -

  Toni Morrison
  (1931 - 2019)

  Toni Morrison (born Chloe Anthony Wofford), was an American author, editor, and professor who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature for being an author "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."

  Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed African American characters; among the best known are her novels The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. In 2001 she was named one of "The 30 Most Powerful Women in America" by Ladies' Home Journal.

  Genres: Literary Fiction

  New Books
  October 2019
  (kindle)

  Goodness and the Literary Imagination
  October 2019
  (paperback)

  Toni Morrison Essential Novels Box Set
  February 2020
  (paperback)

  Mouth Full of Blood

  Series
  Who's Got Game? (with Slade Morrison)
  1. The Ant or the Grasshopper? (2014)
  2. The Lion or the Mouse? (2014)
  3. Poppy or the Snake? (2003)
  Who's Got Game? (2007)

  Novels
  The Bluest Eye (1969)
  Sula (1971)
  Song of Solomon (1977)
  Tar Baby (1981)
  Beloved (1986)
  Jazz (1992)
  Paradise (1997)
  Love (2003)
  A Mercy (2008)
  Home (2012)
  God Help the Child (2015)

  Omnibus
  The Collected Novels of Toni Morrison (1994)
  Jazz / Beloved / Song of Solomon (1994)
  Toni Morrison Boxed Set (1999)
  American Contemporaries (2010) (with Joan Didion, Cormac McCarthy, John Updike and Richard Yates)
  Toni Morrison Essential Novels Box Set (2019)

  Chapbooks
  The Big Box (1999) (with Slade Morrison)
  The Book of Mean People (2002) (with Slade Morrison)
  Who's Got the Game? The Lion or the Mouse? (2003) (with Slade Morrison)
  The Mirror or the Glass? (2007) (with Slade Morrison)

  Plays
  Desdemona (2012) (with Rokia Traore)

  Picture Books
  Peeny Butter Fudge (2009) (with Slade Morrison)
  Little Cloud and Lady Wind (2010) (with Slade Morrison)
  The Tortoise or the Hare (2010) (with Slade Morrison)

  Novellas
  Race (2017)

  Non fiction
  Playing in the Dark (1992)
  Race-Ing Justice, En-gendering Power (1992)
  Nobel Lecture in Literature (1994)
  Nobel Speech and Acceptance (1994)
  Conversations With Toni Morrison (1994)
  To Die for the People (1995) (with Huey P Newton)
  The Dancing Mind (1996)
  Birth of a Nation Hood (1997) (with Claudia Brodsky Lacour)
  Baldwin: Collected Essays (1998) (with James Baldwin)
  Remember (2004)
  Memoirs (2005)
  What Moves at the Margin (2008)
  Burn This Book (2009)
  Please, Louise (2014)
  The Origin of Others (2017)
  Mouth Full of Blood (2019)
  The Source of Self-Regard (2019)
  Goodness and the Literary Imagination (2019)

• Wikipedia -

  Toni Morrison
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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  For the rugby league footballer, see Tony Morrison. For the American politician, see deLesseps Morrison Jr.
  Toni Morrison

  Morrison in 1998
  Born
  Chloe Ardelia Wofford
  February 18, 1931[1]
  Lorain, Ohio, U.S.
  Died
  August 5, 2019 (aged 88)
  New York City, New York, U.S.
  Occupation
  novelist, essayist, children's writer, professor
  Alma mater
  Howard University (BA)
  Cornell University (MA)
  Genre
  American literature
  Notable works
  Beloved
  Song of Solomon
  Tar Baby
  The Bluest Eye
  Notable awards
  Presidential Medal of Freedom
  National Humanities Medal
  Nobel Prize in Literature
  Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
  Spouse
  Harold Morrison
  Children
  2

  Signature

  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 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.
  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.

  Contents
  1
  Life and career
  1.1
  Early years
  1.2
  Adulthood and editing career: 1949–1974
  1.3
  First writings and teaching, 1970–1986
  1.4
  The Beloved Trilogy and the Nobel Prize: 1987–1998
  1.5
  Beloved onscreen and "the Oprah effect"
  1.6
  The early 21st century
  1.7
  Princeton years
  1.8
  Final years: 2010–2019
  2
  Politics, literary reception and legacy
  2.1
  Politics
  2.2
  Relationship to feminism
  2.3
  National Memorial for Peace and Justice
  2.4
  Papers
  3
  Documentary films
  4
  Awards and nominations
  4.1
  Awards
  4.2
  Nominations
  5
  Bibliography
  5.1
  Novels
  5.2
  Children's literature (with Slade Morrison)
  5.3
  Short fiction
  5.4
  Plays
  5.5
  Libretto
  5.6
  Non-fiction
  5.7
  Articles
  6
  See also
  7
  Notes
  8
  References
  9
  External links
  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; when he was about 15, 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."[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 Afro-American writers,[6] including poet and novelist Toni Cade Bambara, radical activist Angela Davis, Black Panther Huey Newton[16] and novelist Gayl Jones, whose writing Morrison discovered. She also brought to publication the autobiography of the outspoken boxing champion Muhammad Ali, The Greatest: My Own Story. In addition, she published and promoted the work of Henry Dumas,[17] a little-known novelist and poet who had been 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 (1974), 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 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."[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]

  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.[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 honorary Doctor 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]

  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."[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 (2012) was half-completed when Slade 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 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.[14][11][73]
  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 ...?'"[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]

  Street art depicting Morrison in Vitoria, Spain.
  Morrison was not afraid to comment on American politics and race relations. , 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]

  A quote from Toni 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.[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 interviewed by Margaret Busby in a 1988 documentary film by Sindamani Bridglal, entitled Identifiable Qualities, shown on Channel 4.[102][103]
  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.[104][105][106]
  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.[107] The film's executive producer was Jonathan Demme. It was directed by Oberlin College Cinema Studies faculty Geoff Pingree and Rian Brown,[108] and incorporates footage shot by Morrison's first-born son Harold Ford Morrison, who also consulted on the film.[109]
  In 2019, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.[110] People featured in the film include Morrison, Angela Davis, Oprah Winfrey, Sonia Sanchez, and Walter Mosley, among others.[111]
  Awards and nominations[edit]
  Awards[edit]
  1975: Ohioana Book Award for Sula[112]
  1977: National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon[113]
  1977: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award[114]
  1987–88: Robert F. Kennedy Book Award[115]
  1988: Helmerich Award[116]
  1988: American Book Award for Beloved[117]
  1988: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations for Beloved[118]
  1988: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved[34]
  1988: Frederic G. Melcher Book Award for Beloved[119][a]
  1988: Ohioana Career Medal for contributions to education, literature, and the humanities[112]
  1988: Honorary Doctor of Laws at University of Pennsylvania[122][123]
  1989: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Harvard University[124]
  1993: Nobel Prize in Literature[125]
  1993: Commander of the Arts and Letters, Paris[99]
  1994: Condorcet Medal, Paris[126]
  1994: Rhegium Julii Prize for Literature[127]
  1996: Jefferson Lecture[128]
  1996: National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters[129]
  1997: Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Gustavus Adolphus College.[130]
  2000: National Humanities Medal[131]
  2002: 100 Greatest African Americans, list by Molefi Kete Asante[132]
  2005: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from University of Oxford[133]
  2008: New Jersey Hall of Fame inductee[134]
  2009: Norman Mailer Prize, Lifetime Achievement[135]
  2010: Officier de la Légion d'Honneur[136]
  2010: Institute for Arts and Humanities Medal for Distinguished Contributions to the Arts and Humanities from the Pennsylvania State University[137]
  2011: Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction[138]
  2011: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Rutgers University Graduation Commencement[139]
  2011: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Geneva[140][141]
  2012: Presidential Medal of Freedom[142]
  2013: The Nichols-Chancellor's Medal awarded by Vanderbilt University[143]
  2013: Honorary Doctorate of Literature awarded by Princeton University[144]
  2013: PEN Oakland - Josephine Miles Literary Award for Home
  2014: Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award given by the National Book Critics Circle[145][146]
  2016: PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction[147][148]
  2016: The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry (The Norton Lectures), Harvard University[149]
  2016: The Edward MacDowell Medal, awarded by the MacDowell Colony[150]
  2018: The Thomas Jefferson Medal, awarded by The American Philosophical Society[151]
  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?[152]
  Bibliography[edit]
  Novels[edit]
  The Bluest Eye. 1970. ISBN 0-452-28706-5.
  Sula. 1973. 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. 1997. ISBN 0-679-43374-0.
  Love. 2003. ISBN 0-375-40944-0.
  A Mercy. 2008. ISBN 978-0-307-26423-7.
  Home. 2012. ISBN 0307594165.
  God Help the Child. 2015. ISBN 0307594173.
  Children's literature (with Slade Morrison)[edit]
  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.
  Please, Louise (2014). ISBN 9781416983385.
  Short fiction[edit]
  "Recitatif" (1983)[153]
  "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)[154][155][156]
  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. ISBN 9781400068487.
  Editor (July 24, 2007). Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 9780307388636.
  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 (April 2004). ISBN 9780618397402.
  What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn C. Denard (April 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[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.

• London Observer - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/11/toni-morrison-tributes-leading-writers-tracy-k-smith

  Toni Morrison remembered: ‘Her irreverence was godly’
  The Observer
  Toni Morrison

  The Nobel prize-winning novelist, arguably the greatest American writer of her time, has died at the age of 88. Here, leading contemporaries pay tribute to her

  • Toni Morrison remembered by French novelist Édouard Louis
  Tracy K Smith, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Bryan Stevenson and Jason Reynolds
  Sun 11 Aug 2019 09.00 BST
  Last modified on Mon 12 Aug 2019 15.38 BST

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  Toni Morrison photographed in New York, 2012. Photograph: Caroll Taveras

  Tracy K Smith: ‘What consoles in the wake of her death is the monument she has left us, a lifetime of work’
  The 22nd poet laureate of the US, from 2017 to 2019, Smith is the author of four books of poetry, including the Pulitzer prize-winning Life on Mars (2011)
  The realisation has recurred in various forms now that Toni Morrison has died. There will be no more novels, no more essays, no more occasions where her living voice reaches across time and space to pierce us with insight. I feel the collective mind wrestling with disbelief, the way my own mind did in the days after my father died. Maybe this is a mistake. Maybe someone will tell us very soon that she has come back.
  What consoles in the wake of her death – which I want to think of as her ascension – is the monument Morrison has left us here on Earth, a lifetime of work in inspired exploration of selfhood and nationhood as informed by notions of race. In America, a country whose founding fallacies of white versus black, dominion versus enslavement and superiority versus inferiority reverberate ceaselessly through the fabric of daily life, there is no topic more urgently relevant. And yet, there is no topic that has been more consciously and unconsciously eschewed, mishandled or contested.
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  In the preface to her 1992 essay collection Playing in the Dark, Morrison writes: “Until very recently, and regardless of the race of the author, the readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white. I am interested to know what that assumption has meant to the literary imagination.”
  Across her celebrated career, in terms both critical and creative, Morrison went to work upon the question of what race has done to the American mind. “My project,” She wrote in that volume’s closing essay, “is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served.”
  Her critical project empowered readers to recognise that it is the needs and fantasies of whiteness that determine the manner in which blackness is depicted in the canon of American literature. And her novels chose black lives as their central subjects, enthralling readers with her commitment to the inner lives of black characters.

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  I was in Morrison’s presence just a few times. I joined Princeton’s creative writing faculty just as Morrison was retiring from teaching, though she remained a presence on campus, and returned occasionally to the classroom. One afternoon, as I sat with my own students in what was essentially the anteroom outside Morrison’s office, she walked through the space. I had been making some point about poetry. I had been very confident in the moments just prior to the sighting, then I felt myself grow small, afraid in the way that certain mountains, even from a distance, can make one feel the fear of falling.

  Once, before a reading on campus by a young black novelist in whom Morrison had taken an interest, the three of us sat on a bench smoking cigarettes. Stupefying awe having already set in, the most I had mustered to say was: “It’s an honour to meet you.” I sat silently as the two of them chatted, thinking it remarkable that Toni Morrison could do just that – chat – so easily, so naturally, like an ordinary mortal.
  Ten years later, I interviewed her onstage. I cringe recalling how I kept asking her, in each of my questions, to solve our nation’s moral problems, to predict its future, when perhaps what she had wanted to talk about were her characters, her sentences, her ways of capturing the very real voices of her –our – richly varied people.
  I didn’t know Toni Morrison. But in another sense – one everyone who has read and loved her work will recognise – she and I were intimates. Near the end of my first marriage, I read Jazz, a novel about passion and violence, transcendence and futility. A part of me grew pained and alert when, in the final pages, the narrator admits to the wish to say, openly, “that I have loved only you, surrendered my whole self reckless to you and nobody else. That I want you to love me back and show it to me.”
  During the year between the death of my father and the birth of my daughter, I sat in a different marriage, surrendering myself to the layers of feeling and consequence which speak directly to the condition of motherhood in Morrison’s novels. If they had been visible to me before, now they stirred a layer of spirit I hadn’t previously understood myself to possess. The new life dawning in me, ghostly and mysterious, was touched and classified by Morrison’s voice. “I’m here. I lasted,” says Sethe once she has claimed Beloved as her own true daughter returned from the dead. “Now I can look at things again because she’s here to see them too.”

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  Morrison photographed in New York City in 1979. Photograph: Jack Mitchell/Getty Images

  Great novels enter us. They reconfigure our sense of who we are and what we feel. They urge a part of ourselves to take flight, to merge with something alive outside of us, the proxy for which is often the novelist herself. In this way, great literature helps us to feel recognised, comprehended, accompanied.
  In the days after Morrison’s death was announced, I sat down to reread The Bluest Eye. It’s a first novel and yet – astoundingly – everything is there. The voices, nimbly alive, don’t just mimic or signal black life, but, rather, invoke and rejoice in it. The clarity and urgency of characters is telegraphed through indelible gestures: three pennies guarded in a child’s shoe, the poor hunched shoulders and tilted head of the girl Pecola, who’s lived her whole short life with an internalised sense of ugly unlovability. The various forms of rage that rise up in the face of lack stand revealed, as do the barbarous social conditions in place to perpetuate such lack – not just in America but everywhere that difference between people is recognised and leveraged.
  She was herself even then.
  What is she now? I find myself asking these days when the reality of her absence remains tenuous. Today, I believe her to be an abiding source of insight and force, coaxing still, from wherever she has gone.

  Jason Reynolds: ‘She told those of us who would grow up to become black writers that we were free’
  Acclaimed American author of novels and poetry for young adults. His 2016 story Ghost was a National Book Award finalist in the US for young people’s literature
  I didn’t encounter Toni Morrison’s work until I was in my early 20s. I wasn’t much of a reader as a kid, let alone a reader of something as complex as Toni Morrison’s work, so I came to it a little late. The first book I read was The Bluest Eye, which I found while working in a book store, and I loved it. After that, I read Sula, which is probably my favourite of her novels, but it took me much longer to read Beloved. I felt like I had to grow into it. I would try it over and over and it would fit a little better each time, and eventually it fit perfectly.
  For me, there is an audacity to her work. She was a maverick and she had an ability to write really complex and painful things in a way that felt boundless. For so long, we had been told how writers were supposed to write – this is the way it’s supposed to sound, to look, to move – and she up-ended all those things, in Beloved in particular. I’m thinking of the way she bleeds and conflates time, and the idea of spirit – how in our tradition, spirit doesn’t necessarily mean something that is gone, but something that is present, that is always there.
  She really pushed the limits and told those of us who would grow up to become black writers that we were free – free to write however and whatever we wanted to write. There is only one other person that gave me that same feeling of freedom, and that’s James Baldwin, but Baldwin pretty much kept with the concrete, whereas Morrison bled into the surrealism and the magic – the magic that makes us who we are.

  If you are a writer, and specifically a black writer, it feels almost impossible not to be influenced by Toni Morrison. There’s that line in Beloved, one her most quoted sentences, where a character says: “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man.” I think about that sentence all the time. It speaks to her ability to describe a man who is trying to express love. How does he articulate this love with limited language? Actually, that language is not so limited: it becomes expansive because he’s forced to get creative in his explanation. So in trying to describe love, he says, “She gather me.” None of us could ever come up with that.
  For a lot of us now, when we’re approaching the page, we don’t have to be afraid of our poetry. We don’t have to be afraid to stretch language. And in being stretched, the language becomes more real. In my own book, Ghost, a young person is trying to describe his anger and he says: “I got so much mad in me.” I don’t get to say that without Toni Morrison – I don’t get to have the freedom to make the language feel familiar and fantastic at the exact same time.

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  Morrison with her sons, Slade and Ford, at her home in December 1978. Photograph: Jack Mitchell/Getty Images
  I wish I’d met her. I’ve got a lot of friends who knew her, but unfortunately I was never in a situation to shake her hand and say thank you. Several years back, I was at an event where they were auctioning a first edition, mint condition, signed copy of Beloved. I bid for it and won the bid, and I remember my friends saying: “You paid way too much money for that.” But I looked at that book last night and thought, man, what a treasure. That’s the closest I’m ever going to come to her.
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  I think she’ll be remembered as someone who loved us – and loved us enough to scare us. I know that she scared the white establishment, and that made me feel safe. It made us feel bigger. She was unafraid.
  In a 1993 interview with Charlie Rose, she said: “What are you without racism? … If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And my feeling is that white people have a very, very serious problem and they should start thinking about what they can do about it.”
  As a kid of 18 or 19 watching that, and even now as a 35-year-old repeating that, I feel emboldened. Toni’s irreverence was godly. Her irreverence felt miraculous. And I think it helped to spark the magic in a lot of us, who had been told over and over again, by every other faction in life, that we were less than and that we deserved invisibility.

  Bryan Stevenson: ‘She was fearless. She said you can be black and great. And she never stopped saying that’
  Campaigning lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, which has overturned the wrongful convictions of 135 prisoners on death row in the American south. Stevenson, 59, chose words by Toni Morrison for the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, the first official monument to the 4,000 black Americans murdered by lynching
  The first book of Toni Morrison’s I read was The Bluest Eye, and what amazed me about it was the honesty with which she expressed what it is like to be black in a world that so clearly values whiteness. I was 17 or 18, just heading to college. In the previously segregated school where I grew up in Delaware we were not exposed to black authors. I had to go and find Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man for myself, for example.
  I think because Morrison had worked as an editor in publishing she was mindful of an absence of a particular voice in that literature, a way of thinking and a way of talking. Storytelling is such a rich part of the tradition of any child of parents who grew up in the south; you were surrounded by adults who told stories with a particular kind of melody and magic. When my mother and her sisters and the neighbours in our community got talking together it would have that quality to it – there was nothing more entertaining or engaging than being at the table while these black women spoke to each other and expressed their fears and their sorrows and their joys and their insights. It was a truth-telling space. Toni Morrison brought that voice out into the world.
  We never met but we had hoped to honour her at our annual dinner for the Equal Justice Initiative in New York next month. When we opened our museum and memorial in Montgomery we had these monuments and sculptures and descriptions of the lynchings, and I felt like we needed something powerful to say to people when they left this really intense experience. I had read a little book Toni Morrison had put out just a couple of years ago of a lecture she had just done at Harvard, “The Origin of Others”, and there was a quote from Beloved in it that was just so perfect for what we wanted to say. When we approached her for permission she could not have been more supportive and encouraging of us using it there, and was hoping to come to see it for herself. The quote contains an exhortation: “And O, my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck... hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.” This idea that if you have survived this violence and terror you can’t just run and hide, you are actually going to have to dig deep and love the parts of yourself that other people would exploit and brutalise and injure – I just thought it was such a powerful way of suggesting how you could recover from that history.

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  Morrison with Barack Obama before being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Photograph: Pete Souza/The White House
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  She was fearless, always an activist. Even in simply saying “I am a black woman writer” she was rejecting the opportunity to be swallowed up by all of these institutions and spaces that might have wanted to embrace her talent but minimise her race or gender. I think that modelled an identity that has been hugely important for many of us who have been made to think that we have to choose between being a great lawyer and a black lawyer, or a great writer and a black writer. She just rejected that dichotomy. She said you can be black and great. And she never stopped saying that. Right to the end she concerned herself with the day-to-day experience of people; I think what was going on at any moment in the lives of black people always shaped her writing and her vision for what was necessary. At a time when we are engaged in a new struggle over the narrative of our history of bigotry she showed what America can be. I loved her for that; we all did.

  Kwame Kwei-Armah: ‘She is magnificent. Her emotional intelligence is second to none’
  Artistic director of the Young Vic. In 2017, while Kwei-Armah was artistic director of Center Stage theatre in Baltimore, he directed an adaptation of Morrison’s 1992 novel, Jazz
  She came into my life in the late 80s when I was given a copy of Beloved. That was the first book of hers I read and in truth I was stunned by it. I didn’t quite know how to negotiate it, in fact. At that point, there was so little literature about slavery and very little literature about people in slavery making huge decisions. From then on, of course, she became the thing, the being that you went to when you wanted absolute truth and poetry.
  She was an influence in that she affected my ability to not see myself as a minority when it came to writing, to not always centralise my fears around reaction to my work from, as she called it, “the white gaze”. Also, I felt that while some of her contemporaries placed the black male as the antithesis of goodness or had [their characters] having to negotiate their way to freedom through or over the black male, Toni Morrison treated me – a black man – like a mother would, like a sister or a lover. She loved me for my flaws and explained them and the reasons for them to me and that’s why she was my go-to writer. Every time she had a new novel I couldn’t wait to read it because I knew there would be a part of my story that was new to me.
  My favourite book is Jazz because she’s not writing for the audience. Song of Solomon is similar. Most people I knew had to pick up Jazz three or four times before they got through it, but when you did there’s a complexity to the storytelling. I think I read it maybe six times and then I directed its world premiere on stage. Right at the beginning of the process, she said: “Listen, theatre’s not my thing so… off you go. Don’t worry about me.” Which was just magnificent for the writer and magnificent for me as the director and producer of it. Later, she sent a beautiful message congratulating us on finding a way to tell our version of her story.
  When I met her at Princeton, she thanked me personally and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was with a group of writers who were involved with The Princeton Slavery project, where the university was doing an investigation into it’s links to slavery and asked us to take a moment in that history to write about. There were six of us, we each wrote a play and Toni introduced them.

  I have only been completely overawed by two people in my life – one was August Wilson and the other was Toni Morrison. As I was about to be introduced I tried to hide a bit. I wanted to observe her rather than meet her, but she was extraordinarily warm. She had this twinkle in her eye like she enjoyed being her. She had nothing to prove to anyone.
  For me, her legacy is total excellence. Technically, she is magnificent, her emotional intelligence is second to none and her bravery – she didn’t care what people thought, be that the reader or not, she just told the truth as she saw it – was equal to her artistry.
  As my own little tribute, to celebrate her life, I’m going to carry a different Toni Morrison book in my bag every day. Today, it’s Song of Solomon. That’s what I’m walking with today.
  • Remembering Toni Morrison – Shared Readings in Celebration of Toni Morrison’s Life and Work is at the Young Vic, London, SE1, 5 September, 6.30pm

• Biography - https://www.biography.com/writer/toni-morrison

  Quick Facts
  Name
  Toni Morrison
  Birth Date
  February 18, 1931
  Death Date
  August 5, 2019
  Education
  Howard University, Lorain High School, Cornell University
  Place of Birth
  Lorain, Ohio
  Place of Death
  Bronx, New York

  Who Was Toni Morrison?
  Early Life and Education
  Cite This Page
  QUOTES
  1 of 12

  “... home is an idea rather than a place. It’s where you feel safe. Where you’re among people who are kind to you – they’re not after you; they don’t have to like you – but they’ll not hurt you. And if you’re in trouble they’ll help you… It’s community – that’s another word for what I’ve described.”
  —Toni Morrison

  Toni Morrison Biography
  (1931–2019)
  Updated:Aug 6, 2019Original:Jan 19, 2018

  Toni Morrison was a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist. Among her best-known novels are 'The Bluest Eye,' 'Song of Solomon,' 'Beloved' and 'A Mercy.'
  Who Was Toni Morrison?
  Born on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize- and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, editor and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, exquisite language and richly detailed African American characters who are central to their narratives. Among her best-known novels are The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, Love and A Mercy. Morrison has earned a plethora of book-world accolades and honorary degrees, also receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

  Toni Morrison
  Photo: PATRICK KOVARIK/AFP/GettyImages

  Early Life and Education
  Born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison was the second oldest of four children. Her father, George Wofford, worked primarily as a welder, but held several jobs at once to support the family. Her mother, Ramah, was a domestic worker. Morrison later credited her parents with instilling in her a love of reading, music and folklore along with clarity and perspective.

  Living in an integrated neighborhood, Morrison did not become fully aware of racial divisions until she was in her teens. "When I was in first grade, nobody thought I was inferior. I was the only black in the class and the only child who could read," she later told a reporter from The New York Times. Dedicated to her studies, Morrison took Latin in school and read many great works of European literature. She graduated from Lorain High School with honors in 1949.
  At Howard University, Morrison continued to pursue her interest in literature. She majored in English and chose the classics for her minor. After graduating from Howard in 1953, Morrison continued her education at Cornell University. She wrote her thesis on the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, and completed her master's degree in 1955. She then moved to the Lone Star State to teach at Texas Southern University.
  Life as a Mother and Random House Editor
  In 1957, Morrison returned to Howard University to teach English. There she met Harold Morrison, an architect originally from Jamaica. The couple married in 1958 and welcomed their first child, Harold, in 1961. After the birth of her son, Morrison joined a writers group that met on campus. She began working on her first novel with the group, which started out as a short story.

  Morrison decided to leave Howard in 1963. After spending the summer traveling with her family in Europe, she returned to the United States with her son. Her husband, however, had decided to move back to Jamaica. At the time, Morrison was pregnant with their second child. She moved back home to live with her family in Ohio before the birth of son Slade in 1964. The following year, she moved with her sons to Syracuse, New York, where she worked for a textbook publisher as a senior editor. Morrison later went to work for Random House, where she edited works by Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones, renowned for their literary fiction, as well as luminaries like Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali.
  Toni Morrison's Books
  'The Bluest Eye'
  Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. She used as her literary first name "Toni," based on a nickname derived from St. Anthony after she'd joined the Catholic Church. The book follows a young African American girl, Pecola Breedlove, who believes her incredibly difficult life would be better if only she had blue eyes. The controversial book didn't sell well, with Morrison stating in a 1994 afterword that the reception to the work was parallel to how her main character was treated by the world: "dismissed, trivialized, misread."
  'Sula'
  Morrison nonetheless continued to explore the African American experience in its many forms and eras in her work. Her next novel, Sula (1973), explores good and evil through the friendship of two women who grew up together in Ohio. Sula was nominated for the American Book Award.
  'Song of Solomon'
  Song of Solomon (1977) became the first work by an African American author to be a featured selection in the Book of the Month club since Native Son by Richard Wright. The lyrical story follows the journey of Milkman Dead, a Midwestern urban denizen who attempts to make sense of family roots and the often harsh realities of his world. Morrison received a number of accolades for the novel, which would go on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award and become a perennial favorite among academics and general readers.
  Pulitzer for 'Beloved'
  A rising literary star, Morrison was appointed to the National Council on the Arts in 1980. The following year, Tar Baby was published. The Caribbean-based novel drew some inspiration from folktales and received a decidedly mixed reaction from critics. Her next work, however, proved to be one of her greatest masterpieces. Beloved (1987) explores love and the supernatural. Inspired by real-world figure Margaret Garner, main character Sethe, a former slave, is haunted by her decision to kill her children rather than see them become enslaved. Three of her children survived, but her infant daughter died at her hand. Yet Sethe's daughter returns as a living entity who becomes an unrelenting presence in her home. For this spellbinding work, Morrison won several literary awards, including the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Ten years later, the book was turned into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey, Thandie Newton and Danny Glover.

  Morrison Wins a Nobel Prize in 1993
  Morrison became a professor at Princeton University in 1989 and continued to produce great works, including Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). In recognition of her contributions to her field, she received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first African American woman to be selected for the award. The following year, she published the novel Jazz, which explores marital love and betrayal in 20th-century Harlem.
  At Princeton, Morrison established a special workshop for writers and performers known as the Princeton Atelier in 1994. The program was designed to help students create original works in a variety of artistic fields.

  More Books By Morrison
  'Paradise'
  Outside of her academic work, Morrison continued to write new works of fiction. Her next novel, Paradise (1998), which focuses on a fictional African American town called Ruby, earned mixed reviews.
  Children's Books
  In 1999, Morrison branched out to children's literature. She worked with her artist son Slade on The Big Box (1999), The Book of Mean People (2002), The Ant or the Grasshopper? (2003) and Little Cloud and Lady Wind (2010). She has also explored other genres, writing the play Dreaming Emmett in the mid-1980s and the lyrics for "Four Songs" with composer Andre Previn in 1994 and "Sweet Talk" with composer Richard Danielpour in 1997. And in 2000, The Bluest Eye, which initially had modest sales, became a literary blockbuster upon being chosen as the Oprah Book Club pick, going on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.
  'Love'
  Her next novel, Love (2003), divides its narrative between the past and present. Bill Cosey, a wealthy entrepreneur and owner of the Cosey Hotel and Resort, is the center figure in the work. The flashbacks explore his community life and flawed relationships with women, with his death casting a long shadow on the present. A critic for Publisher's Weekly praised the book, stating that "Morrison has crafted a gorgeous, stately novel whose mysteries are gradually unearthed."
  Writing a Libretto
  In 2006, Morrison announced she was retiring from her post at Princeton. That year, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best novel of the past 25 years. She continued to explore new art forms, writing the libretto for Margaret Garner, an American opera that explores the tragedy of slavery through the true life story of one woman's experiences. The work debuted at the New York City Opera in 2007.
  Morrison traveled back to the early days of colonialism in America for A Mercy (2008), a book that some have construed as a page-turner in its unfolding. Once again, a woman who is both a slave and a mother must make a terrible choice regarding her child, who becomes part of an expanding homestead. As a critic from the Washington Post described it, the novel is "a fusion of mystery, history and longing," with the New York Times singling out the work as one of the 10 Best Books of the year.

  Morrison's Nonfiction Books
  In addition to her many novels, Morrison has crafted nonfiction as well. She published a collection of her essays, reviews and speeches, What Moves at the Margin, in 2008.
  A champion for the arts, Morrison spoke out about censorship in October 2009 after one of her books was banned at a Michigan high school. She served as editor for Burn This Book, a collection of essays on censorship and the power of the written word, which was published that same year. She told a crowd gathered for the launch of the Free Speech Leadership Council about the importance of fighting censorship. "The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists' questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films—that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink," Morrison said.
  In 2017 the author released The Origin of Others — an exploration on race, fear, mass migration and borders — based on her Norton lectures at Harvard.
  Morrison's Late Career Books
  'Home'
  Morrison continued to be one of literature's great storytellers through her 80s. She published the novel Home in 2012, exploring a period of American history once again—this time, the post-Korean War era. "I was trying to take the scab off the '50s, the general idea of it as very comfortable, happy, nostalgic. Mad Men. Oh, please," she said to the Guardian in reference to choosing the setting. "There was a horrible war you didn't call a war, where 58,000 people died. There was McCarthy." Her main character, Frank, is a veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that adversely affects his relationships and ability to function in the world.
  While writing the novel, Morrison experienced a great personal loss. Her son Slade died of pancreatic cancer in December 2010.
  Around the time that Home was published, Morrison also debuted another work: She worked with opera director Peter Sellars and songwriter Rokia Traoré on a new production inspired by William Shakespeare's Othello. The trio focused on the relationship between Othello's wife Desdemona and her African nurse, Barbary, in Desdemona, which premiered in London in the summer of 2012. That same year Morrison received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.
  'God Help the Child'
  In 2015, Morrison published God Help the Child, a layered novella focusing on the experiences of the character Bride — a young, dark-skinned black woman who works in the cosmetics industry while reckoning with the rejections of her past. That same year the BBC aired the documentary Toni Morrison Remembers. In autumn 2016, she received the Pen/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

  Death
  Morrison died on August 5, 2019 at Montefiore Medical Center in New York.

  Fact Check
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  Citation Information
  Article Title
  Toni Morrison Biography
  Author
  Biography.com Editors
  Website Name
  The Biography.com website
  URL
  https://www.biography.com/writer/toni-morrison
  Access Date
  November 25, 2019
  Publisher
  A&E Television Networks
  Last Updated
  August 6, 2019
  Original Published Date
  April 2, 2014

• Time - https://time.com/5630489/toni-morrison-dies/

  Toni Morrison, Seminal Author Who Stirringly Chronicled the Black American Experience, Dies at 88

  oni Morrison, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who illuminated the joys and agonies of black American life through breathtakingly vital works like Beloved, Song of Solomon and A Mercy, died on Monday night, her publisher Knopf confirmed. She was 88 years old.
  Over her six-decade career, she wrote 11 novels, five children’s books, two plays, a song cycle and an opera. She served as an editor and professor, mentoring generations of young writers of color. After being largely ignored as a writer for a decade in the ‘70s, Morrison went on to win accolade after accolade, from the Nobel Prize in Literature to the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.
  Morrison widened the nation’s literary canon, serving as its conscience through trying times and establishing herself as the keeper of its marginalized histories. Through her inventive turns of phrase, graceful incorporation of African-American vernacular, textured character portraits, sharp historical gaze and tragic plot turns, she is one of the most accomplished and impactful writers in the history of American literature.
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  “What was driving me to write was the silence — so many stories untold and unexamined,” she told The New Yorker in 2003.
  Her early years
  Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18, 1931, in the rust-belt town of Lorain, Ohio. She was the second of four children born to Ramah (née Willis), a homemaker, and George Wofford, a shipyard welder. Both of her parents witnessed the unbridled racism of the south firsthand: her father, as a child, saw the lynching of two men, and harbored a deep distrust of white people for the rest of his life. The family’s life in the more integrated Lorain was nevertheless extremely trying, especially during the Great Depression: When Morrison was about two, her family’s landlord set their apartment on fire for not being able to afford the rent.

  Stories were an integral part of family life. Her parents told her ghost stories and traditional African-American folktales; so did her grandmother Ardelia Willis, who also lived with them. “She told us stories to keep us working at tedious tasks,” Morrison wrote of her grandmother in the foreword to Tar Baby, “picking through baskets of wild grapes to sort out the bruised; to take our minds off pain and chickenpox; to split open the dreary world to expose an enchanted one.”
  Morrison was a precocious reader who devoured works by Jane Austen, Richard Wright, Mark Twain and many more. She converted to Catholicism when she was 12, and as a teenager she joined her school’s yearbook staff and debate team. To make money she cleaned houses for white families and worked as a secretary to the head librarian at the Lorain Public Library.
  When Morrison reached college age she decided to attend Howard University — her father took on another job in order to afford the tuition, flouting union rules. There, she studied humanities under Alain Locke — the acknowledged “Dean” of the Harlem Renaissance — and joined the Howard University Players, the school’s theatrical group, with which she toured the segregated south. After graduating in 1953 she went on to Cornell, where she received a master’s degree in English and wrote her thesis on William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.

  Toni Morrison, in Milan, Italy, 30th January 2017. Leonardo Cendamo—Getty Images
  Launching her writing career
  After graduating from Cornell, Morrison embarked on her teaching career, first landing a job at Texas Southern University, and then back at Howard, where she taught the soon-to-be civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael. It was there that she met Harold Morrison, an architect, and the couple wed 1958; the pair went on to have two children (Ford and Slade) before divorcing in 1964.

  During this era she began work on her first novel, The Bluest Eye, which depicted a victimized adolescent black girl obsessed by white beauty standards, and who begs God to turn her eyes blue. “I wanted to read this book and no one had written it, so I thought that maybe I would write it in order to read it,” she told The Guardian in 2015. She hoped to write a novel devoid of the white gaze, which she felt hovered over the work of even the most celebrated black writers like Ralph Ellison and Frederick Douglass.
  “I’ve spent my entire life trying to make sure the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books,” she said in the 2019 documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am.
  The Bluest Eye was published in 1970 to a minimal response, although the New York Times reviewed it positively, calling her a “writer of considerable power and tenderness.” To earn a living for herself and her two children, Morrison worked as an editor at Random House, encouraging black writers like Gayl Jones and Angela Davis to embrace their own unique and culturally-specific voices. “The way black people talk is not so much the use of non-standard grammar as it is the manipulation of metaphor,” she said in a 1994 interview with Nellie McKay.
  In 1974, she published The Black Book, an anthology of African-American life and history that greatly influenced the perception of black anthropology and culture. Two years later, she fought for the publication and marketing of Muhammad Ali’s autobiography The Greatest, despite his controversial rejection of the Vietnam War.
  Gaining prominence in the literary world
  As Morrison held down a full-time job and raised two children, she wrote whenever she could find time: at daybreak, or in the midst of a commute. Davis, interviewed in The Pieces I Am, recalls that Morrison would scribble paragraphs on the steering wheel of her car while stuck in traffic. Morrison stole enough writing time to be able to publish two more novels in the ‘70s: Sula (1973), which traced a black Ohio neighborhood through the eyes of two best friends; and Song of Solomon (1977), a decades-long epic chronicling the life of a black man.

  The latter, in particular, broke through to national audiences, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award. The book’s success convinced her that she could commit herself to being a full-time writer. In 1981, upon the release of her fourth novel, Tar Baby, she was on the cover of Newsweek, becoming the first black woman to appear on the cover of a national magazine since Zora Neale Hurston in 1943.
  Her best-known work, Beloved, was published in 1987. The novel is based on a true story Morrison came across while publishing The Black Book — of a runaway slave who kills her infant daughter after being recaptured by enslavers. An instant sensation, the novel remained on the best-seller list for 25 weeks and was added to school reading lists across the country. After its snubbing at the National Book Awards ensued a heated controversy, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

  Author Toni Morrison at home. (Photo by James Keyser/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images) James Keyser—The LIFE Images Collection via G
  “I felt I represented a whole world of women who either were silenced or who never had received the imprimatur of the established literary world,” Morrison told The New York Times Magazine in 1994.

  While Morrison became revered, she also became feared —for her works’ graphic violence or sexually explicit content. Time and time again, her books were removed from school curriculum; her novel Paradise was even banned in Texas prisons for fear it would cause a riot.
  “History has always proved that books are the first plain on which certain battles are fought,” she said in The Pieces I Am.
  The 1990s were full of awards and accolades for Morrison. She was chosen for a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1996, and the 1996 National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She wrote two more novels (1992’s Jazz and 1997’s Paradise) and extensive essays about the racially charged controversies of the era, from the Anita Hill hearings to Bill Clinton’s cultural blackness to the O.J. Simpson trial. She also developed a famous bond with Oprah Winfrey, who added some of Morrison’s novels to her influential Book Club, and who starred and co-produced a 1998 film adaptation of Beloved.
  “It’s impossible to actually imagine the American literary landscape without a Toni Morrison,” Winfrey said in 2018. “She is our conscience, she is our seer, she is our truth-teller.”
  Her enduring legacy
  But with success also came tragedy. In an eerie example of life imitating art, Morrison’s home in Rockland County caught fire in 1993 — just like Eva Peace’s did in Sula. Her mother died from unrelated causes less than a year later.
  Morrison appeared on the cover of TIME in 1998 following the release of Paradise. In the article, she talked about her new novel and her inauspicious origins: “The world back then didn’t expect much from a little black girl, but my father and mother certainly did.”
  After the millennium, Morrison released four more novels to great acclaim and taught at Princeton until her retirement from that post in 2006. In 2008, she made her first-ever presidential endorsement, in support of Barack Obama; Four years later, he reciprocated by awarding her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

  Toni Morrison receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in the East Room of the White House on May 29, 2012 in Washington, D.C. Leigh Vogel—WireImage
  “I remember reading Song of Solomon when I was a kid and not just trying to figure out how to write, but also how to be and how to think,” President Obama said at the ceremony. “Toni Morrison’s prose brings us that kind of moral and emotional intensity that few writers ever attempt.”

  Shortly after her death, Obama also poignantly praised her in Twitter, calling her a “national treasure.”

  Morrison’s Medal of Freedom arrived during yet another period of grieving: Two years earlier, her son Slade died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 45; the pair had written several children’s books together. Morrison was in the process of writing her novel Home, and her grief left her unable to write. She eventually regrouped and published the novel the same month she received her Medal of Freedom, telling the Telegraph that year that she realized “the last thing my son would want was for me to be very self-involved and narcissistic and self-stroking.”
  Morrison remained active in public life through the 2010s, commenting on political issues, giving interviews, and writing constantly.
  “The writing is — I’m free from pain,” she told NPR’s Fresh Air in 2015. “It’s where nobody tells me what to do; it’s where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I’m writing.”
  Correction, October 10
  The original version of this story misstated the historical significance of Toni Morrison’s appearance on the cover of Newsweek. The 1981 magazine cover made her the first black woman to appear on the cover of any national magazine–not just Newsweek–since Zora Neale Hurston in 1943.

• Morning Edition, NPR - https://www.npr.org/2019/08/06/542391535/toni-morrison-whose-soaring-novels-were-rooted-in-black-lives-dies-at-88

  Toni Morrison, Whose Soaring Novels Were Rooted In Black Lives, Dies At 88
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  Toni Morrison was the author of Beloved, Song of Solomon and The Bluest Eye. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
  Michel Euler/AP
  Updated at 10:05 a.m. ET
  When Toni Morrison received her Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, her remarks began with a reflection on the phrase once upon a time. In her signature, measured cadence, Morrison told the Swedish Academy she believed these were some of the first words we remember from our childhoods.
  Morrison, who was 88, died Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, according to her publisher, Penguin Random House. Morrison's family, in a statement released by the publisher, said she died "following a short illness" and surrounded by loved ones.
  "She was an extremely devoted mother, grandmother, and aunt who reveled in being with her family and friends. The consummate writer who treasured the written word, whether her own, her students or others, she read voraciously and was most at home when writing," her family said. "Although her passing represents a tremendous loss, we are grateful she had a long, well lived life."
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  Morrison's work focused on African American life and culture, and she dominated an industry in which depictions of black life were often limited and rooted in stereotype.
  Her masterwork, Beloved, was a "once upon a time" based in bloody truth. Its real-life inspiration was Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery and attempted to kill herself and her children — her 2-year-old daughter died — rather than be captured and returned to a plantation. Beloved was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. A decade later, Oprah Winfrey produced and starred in a movie based on the book.
  Morrison was 56 when Beloved was published in 1987, but she had been living with stories since childhood. Born Chloe Wofford, she grew up with tales being told all around her in her hometown of Lorain, Ohio. Her grandparents, like millions of blacks, left the segregated South for the North, during the Great Migration.
  "I lived in a little working-class town that had no black neighborhoods at all ..." Morrison told Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 2015. "We all played together. Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from East Europe or from Mexico."
  She said that she wasn't particularly aware of segregation growing up, but that her father "was very, very serious in his hatred of white people." Her mother mitigated that. "Everybody was an individual whom she approved of or disapproved of based on her perception of them as individuals," Morrison recalled.
  As a child, young Chloe listened when the adults told stories about their Southern homes. In a 2010 interview, she said their language stayed with her. Within her own family, she said. "There was street language, there was sermonic language. You know, people actually quoted the Bible to you."

  Book Reviews
  'Home': Toni Morrison's Taut, Triumphant New Novel
  Author Interviews
  'I Regret Everything': Toni Morrison Looks Back On Her Personal Life

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  Wofford went to college at Howard University (where she became Toni, using the nickname of her baptismal saint, Anthony). It was there that she experienced, for the first time, a hierarchy of color within the African American community. "On the campus, where I felt safe and welcome, I began to realize that this idea of the lighter, the better and the darker, the worse ... really had an impact on sororities, on friendships, on all sorts of things, and it was stunning to me," she said in 2015.
  She earned her master's at Cornell and married architect Harold Morrison, with whom she had two sons. They divorced after seven years.
  Morrison started her early publishing career as an editor, first in textbooks, then for general circulation books. She told an audience at the 92nd Street Y in New York that she wasn't happy with how most black books were being edited back then. "I thought the editing was sloppy," she recalled. "I thought the productions were mishandled, even the great books, like Roots. ... When you read them carefully, you'd see that nobody was paying any attention."

  The Week's Best Stories From NPR Books
  'I Regret Everything': Toni Morrison Looks Back On Her Personal Life
  So she consciously sought out excellent black authors, pulling them into what was — and mostly still is — the alabaster publishing industry. She edited Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali and the novelist Gayl Jones during the social upheaval of the late 1960s and early '70s. Morrison saw this as her contribution to the civil rights movement.
  "I made it my business to collect African Americans who were vocal, either politically, or just writing wonderful fiction," she said.
  Even as she edited, Morrison secretly wrote for herself, getting up before her children were awake. She later said that when she wrote, she was free from pain. "It's where I have control," she said. "It's where nobody tells me what to do. It's where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. ... I'm thinking up dangerous, difficult things, but it is also extremely safe for me to be in that place."

  The Bluest Eye
  by Toni Morrison
  Paperback, 205 pages
  purchase
  Her first book, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. It's a tale about a dark-skinned little girl who believes blue eyes will make her beautiful and cherished.
  Piper Huguley, a professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, recalled how she felt when she read The Bluest Eye as a college student. It helped her see "colorism and its connection to self-loathing, and how deeply embedded that could go," she said. It was a theme Morrison explored further in her 2015 book God Help the Child.
  Huguley said that kind of frankness about race has made Morrison's work essential reading. "She exists in a class we call Seminal Writers, that every English major must take," Huguley explained. "That means she belongs for us here at Spelman, and no doubt elsewhere, as part of the African American literary canon, that is, an author who must be read."
  Morrison's stories weave between the familiar and the fantastical: In Song of Solomon, a key element was an ancient folk tale about black people flying away from enslavement and back home to Africa. The theme of mother-daughter love runs through several books, such as Beloved and A Mercy, in which women make terrible sacrifices for their children.
  These are books that focus, without apology or explanation, on black lives. And in 1998, as a guest on a talk show, she said she had no interest in making white characters more central to her stories.
  "I've spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books," she said.
  Morrison was grounded in the black cultural liberationist art of the 1960s, said Richard Yarborough, who teaches African American literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. She and others in that generation "expressed their mission" by focusing on black lives, he said.

  Book Reviews
  Toni Morrison's New Novel Is Best Read With Her Backlist In Mind
  And generations of black female writers, no matter their genre, have been touched by her. "Morrison is such a monumental figure, that there is no way you could write about black women's experiences without taking her into account," he said.
  She showed, by example, the validity of black, female lives. And through her many "once upon a times," Morrison's expansive vision of black humanity now resonates around the globe.

• Rolling Stone - https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/toni-morrison-beloved-author-dead-obituary-867889/

  Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize-Winning Novelist, Dead at 88
  Author best known for Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon
  By Jon Blistein

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  Toni Morrison, the Nobel Laureate and author of 'The Bluest Eye' and 'Beloved,' has died at the age of 88.
  Ian Langsdon/EPA/Shutterstock
  Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist who told vivid stories about black life in America, especially the lives of black women, with stark strokes of magical realism, died Monday, the publishing house Penguin Random House confirmed. She was 88.
  Morrison died Monday night at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York. A specific cause of death was not given, though Morrison’s family said she died following a “short illness.”
  In a statement, Morrison’s family said, “It is with profound sadness we share that, following a short illness, our adored mother and grandmother, Toni Morrison, passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends. She was an extremely devoted mother, grandmother, and aunt who reveled in being with her family and friends. The consummate writer who treasured the written word, whether her own, her students or others, she read voraciously and was most at home when writing. Although her passing represents a tremendous loss, we are grateful she had a long, well lived life.

  “While we would like to thank everyone who knew and loved her, personally or through her work, for their support at this difficult time, we ask for privacy as we mourn this loss to our family. We will share information in the near future about how we will celebrate Toni’s incredible life.”

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  Morrison’s death elicited an outpouring of tributes from across the cultural and political spectrum. Beyoncé shared a line from Morrison’s 1987 book Song of Solomon, which she also used in her concert film Homecoming: “If you surrender to the air you can ride it.” And Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic gubernatorial candidate for Georgia, tweeted, “Toni Morrison was a towering intellect, a brilliant scribe of our nation’s complex stories, a heartbreaking journalist of our deepest desires, and a groundbreaking author who destroyed precepts, walls and those who dared underestimate her capacity. Rest well and in peace.”

  Morrison published 11 novels over the course of her career, along with several books of non-fiction, scattered short stories, children’s books, a couple plays and an opera libretto. Her best known works include her debut novel, The Bluest Eye, 1977’s Song of Solomon and 1987’s Beloved, which is widely considered her masterpiece and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
  In 1993, Morrison became the first black woman from any nation to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Upon awarding her the prize, the committee described Morrison as someone “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”
  Morrison’s longtime editor at Knopf, Robert Gottlieb, said, “She was a great woman and a great writer, and I don’t know which I will miss more.”
  As much as she was adored by critics and prize committees, Morrison was also one of the most widely read authors in America. As The New York Times noted, her books regularly appeared on the best-seller list — Beloved stayed there for 25 weeks — while Oprah picked Song of Solomon for her first ever Book Club (she would guide her viewers to three more Morrison books over the next few years).
  Despite her prolific and wildly succesful writing career, Morrison notably did not publish her first novel until she was 39. Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, her parents weaned her on stories and songs from the African-American oral tradition, while as she got older, she turned to authors like Austen, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Morrison studied English at Howard University, got a Masters at Cornell and began her career as a professor, first at Texas Southern University then Howard. She eventually moved into publishing and quickly became the first black woman to hold a senior editor position at the fiction department at Random House.
  Amidst all this — and while raising two sons as a single mother — Morrison woke up each morning at 4 a.m. to work on The Bluest Eye, which had begun as a piece for a fiction workshop back when she was teaching at Howard. While the book wasn’t a huge hit when it was first published, it did garner the attention of Knopf’s Robert Gottlieb, who would go on to work with Morrison throughout the rest of her career.

  Morrison’s next book, 1975’s Sula, would earn her a National Book Award nomination, while her third novel, Song of Solomon, would prove to be her break out. The Book of the Month Club made it their first book by a black author since Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940, while it also won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
  During the Seventies, as Morrison’s own star rose, she continued her work at Random House where she helped usher in a new generation of black writers, including Angela Davis and Gayl Jones. She also helped publish several acclaimed collections featuring black writers, including 1972’s Contemporary African Literature, and brought in Muhammed Ali’s 1975 autobiography The Greatest.
  Morrison left the publishing world in the early Eighties to focus more on her writing, while she also began teaching again. With the publication of Beloved in 1987, Morrison cemented her place in the contemporary American canon, to the extent that in January 1988, 48 black writers — including Maya Angelou and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. — published an open letter in The New York Times decrying the fact that Morrison had yet to win the Pulitzer or the National Book Award (Morrison won the former a few months later).
  Morrison would follow Beloved with two more books that formed a trilogy, 1992’s Jazz and 1997’s Paradise. She would release four more novels over the next two decades, the last of which, God Help the Child, arrived in 2015. In the late Nineties, Morrison also began publishing children’s books with her son, Slade Morrison, who died from pancreatic cancer in 2010. In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded Morrison the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
  On Twitter, Obama mourned Morrison, writing, “Toni Morrison was a national treasure, as good a storyteller, as captivating, in person as she was on the page. Her writing was a beautiful, meaningful challenge to our conscience and our moral imagination. What a gift to breathe the same air as her, if only for a while.”
  Morrison’s unparalleled body of work made her one of the most distinct and significant figures in 20th century American literature. While her popularity helped her transcend labels, Morrison herself never shied away from called a “black writer.” As she told The Guardian in 2015, “I’m writing for black people, in the same way that Tolstoy was not writing for me, a 14-year-old colored girl from Lorain, Ohio,” she said. “I don’t have to apologize or consider myself limited because I don’t [write about white people] — which is not absolutely true, there are lots of white people in my books. The point is not having the white critic sit on your shoulder and approve it.”

• The New Yorker - https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/toni-morrisons-truth

  Toni Morrison’s Truth
  She saw the madness we’re living in now years ago.
  By Hilton AlsAugust 8, 2019

  Photograph by Katy Grannan

  When she looked at you and addressed you by your Christian name, she made it sound like a promise, one that stood on the side of everything that was juicy, smart, black, amused, yours. In the old days, when ladies were “colored” and she herself was just a child, she had learned from those ladies, probably, the same eye-rolling, close-mouthed look of incredulity that she employed when she recounted a glaring error of judgment on someone else’s part, or something stupid someone said or didn’t know they were about to say. After she gave you that look, you never wanted to say anything dumb again, ever. If she took you in as a friend—and this was rare in a world where so many people wanted her time and felt they had a right to her time, given the intimacy of her voice—she was welcoming but guarded. Then, if you were lucky enough and passed the criteria she required of all her friends, which included the ability to laugh loud and long at your own folly, and hers, too, she was less guarded, and then very frank: there was no time for anything but directness.
  Once she told me that when she was a young single mother raising her two boys, she would look in on her children as they slept. Here, Toni, the former student-actress, would clutch at her blouse to convey wonder and self-sacrifice as she looked down at her children. “This is the view I had of myself then,” she said, the laughter starting to bubble up in her chest. Because, the truth is, her kids weren’t having it. Indeed, one of her boys asked her not to roam around the room like that at night, it frightened him. And here she would burst out with a laugh that mocked the very idea of self-perception, let alone self-dramatization: they would always be knocked down by someone else’s reality.
  She was a wonderful conversationalist with beautiful hands; good manicures were one of her few indulgences after a lifetime of tending to others, washing dishes, cleaning up, making do. When we first met, in 2002, she didn’t have to straighten out anyone else’s mess. Like the older women she described so beautifully in “The Bluest Eye,” she was, by that time, in fact and at last free. Free from the responsibility of having to please anyone but herself. She was excited to be herself. When you visited her, or ran into her at an event, she sat and told stories. She did this without the benefit of an iPhone to look certain details up. The details were in her head; she was a writer. As she described this or that, she drew you in not just by her choice of words but by the steady stream of laughter that supported her words, until, by the end of the story, when the scene, people, weather, were laying at your feet, she would produce a fusillade of giggles that rose and fell and then disappeared as she shook her head.
  More truths: she didn’t like something I wrote about one of her books in an early piece and she said so. We were sitting in a large, empty restaurant near her home in Rockland County. She had driven us there with a speed and force that shocked me, but, then again, why should it have? She was Toni Morrison. This was one of the first times that we were alone. (Previously, we always met through friends.) When she said that my criticism displeased her, I turned around; I truly did not know whom she was talking to, and told her so. The person who wrote what she didn’t like was someone I didn’t remember being, someone I no longer identified with, a person who had probably tried to big himself up because ants always think they’re taller crawling on the shoulder of giants. After I said some version of all that, she said that she understood. And then the conversation began in earnest, but not before I had another shock, this one of realization: I had hurt Toni Morrison. Somehow, Toni Morrison could be hurt.

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  When you were with her, the fabled editor came out, and she saw your true measure as a person, and what you could do, or what she felt you could do, because she came up in publishing when editing was synonymous with care. I think she worried about my tendency to worry and not take up too much space as a writer, to let others go first, to draw a veil between me and the world out of shame and fear and trepidation. She had probably seen this tendency in a number of the women writers she nurtured over the years, and in some of the gay black male artists, such as Bill Gunn, whom she had loved, too. (When he was sick with AIDS, she went to the hospital to see him with one of her famous cakes. “I knew he couldn’t eat that cake,” she said. “But he was happy to have that cake.”) So when you stepped out, she applauded you. Once, I had gone with a friend to have some shoes made by a cobbler. When the shoes were finished, Toni saw me wearing them at a dinner party. I told her the story. She looked at me, beamed, and said, “That’s right, my shoes.”
  Boldness can make you lonely, but she never complained of loneliness. She talked about the world as though it were in conversation with her. I have yet to meet anyone who could “read” the media with that kind of swiftness and sanity that she could. She saw the madness we’re living in now years ago because of certain trends in reporting and in literature. “The complexity of the so-called individual that’s been praised for decades in America somehow has narrowed itself to the ‘me,’ ” she said.
  As a gorgeous-looking student at Howard University, in the nineteen-fifties, Toni acted a bit with the Howard Players, a group then nurtured by our mutual friend, the late, great director and writer Owen Dodson. He told me what a superb actress she had been, beautiful in form and voice, and it’s always interesting to me how so many of the women writers I’ve admired—Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni—had, without knowing it, first started to look for themselves, for their writer’s voices, on the stage. Acting and singing requires the performer to do two things simultaneously: be themselves and not be themselves but a character, giving life to a script they did not write.
  Of course, that condition is not unknown to women in general, and when Toni used to say, “I didn’t want to grow up to be a writer, I wanted to grow up to be an adult,” she was saying a lot. Because being an adult required a lot, namely taking the human race and one’s role in it seriously. She wrote what she called “village literature,” for the tribe, by which she meant black people. To be understood in the diaspora that we call black life requires a high degree of intellectual alacrity and technical finesse: black people speak many languages in part because they’ve had to survive many different kinds of dominant cultures in order to live, let alone prosper, make things, make a mark. It takes a hugely ambitious artist to say that I will speak to these people—my people—in a voice we can all understand, together, just us, and if anyone else wants to follow, they can. To do that, Toni closed the door on what far too many writers and artists of color become preoccupied with when they make, directly or indirectly, “whiteness” their subject. Toni kicked patriarchy to the curb with barely a backward glance.
  Part of the extraordinary power of “Sula” is that it’s a world where men are not the focus. It’s the sound of women’s voices that takes precedence, makes the story. About two-thirds through the book, Sula, an artist without an art, a free colored woman, returns to the town where she grew up and where she was raised, in part, by her grandmother Eva.
  Sula threw herself on Eva’s bed. “The rest of my stuff will be on later.”
  “I should hope so. Them little old furry tails ain’t going to do you no more good than they did the fox that was wearing them.”
  “Don’t you say hello to nobody when you ain’t seen them for ten years?”
  “If folks let somebody know where they is and when they coming, then other folks can get ready for them. If they don’t—if they just pop in all sudden like—then they got to take whatever mood they find.”
  “How you been doing, Big Mamma?”
  “Gettin’ by. Sweet of you to ask. You was quick enough when you wanted something. When you needed a little change or . . . ”
  “Don’t talk to me about how much you gave me, Big Mamma, and how much I owe you or none of that.”
  “Oh? I ain’t supposed to mention it?”
  “OK. Mention it.” Sula shrugged and turned over on her stomach, her buttocks toward Eva.
  “You ain’t been in this house ten seconds and already you starting something.”
  “Takes two, Big Mamma.”
  “Well, don’t let your mouth start nothing that your ass can’t stand. When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.”
  “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.”
  “Selfish. Ain’t no woman got no business floatin’ around without no man.”
  “You did.”
  “Not by choice.”
  “Mamma did.”
  “Not by choice, I said. It ain’t right for you to want to stay off by yourself. You need . . . I’m a tell you what you need.”
  Sula sat up. “I need you to shut your mouth.”
  “Don’t nobody talk to me like that. Don’t nobody . . . ”
  “This body does. Just ’cause you was bad enough to cut off your own leg you think you got a right to kick everybody with the stump.”
  “Who said I cut off my leg?”
  “Well, you stuck it under a train to collect insurance.”
  “Hold on, you lyin’ heifer!”
  “I aim to.”
  “Bible say honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land thy God giveth thee.”
  “Mamma must have skipped that part. Her days wasn’t too long.”
  “Pus mouth! God’s going to strike you!”
  “Which God? The one watched you burn Plum?”
  “Don’t talk to me about no burning. You watched your own mamma. You crazy roach! You the one should have been burnt!”
  “But I ain’t. Got that? I ain’t. Any more fires in this house, I’m lighting them!”
  “Hellfire don’t need lighting and it’s already burning in you . . . ”
  “Whatever’s burning in me is mine!”
  “Amen!”
  “And I’ll split this town in two and everything in it before I’ll let you put it out!”
  “Pride goeth before a fall.”
  “What the hell do I care about falling?”
  The brilliance of this conversation is in its economy and the reality of the women’s talk: if you grew up anywhere near these types of characters, it’s like listening to a transcript of dialogue that you’ve heard in the privacy of your own home, or a relative’s. Sula shows her ass to show her anger, and then some.
  When Toni talked about writers and books she admired, like Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” she let it be known that she was a little annoyed by Ellison’s presupposition that his protagonist didn’t exist in the world because white people didn’t see him. Ellison’s protagonist wasn’t invisible to her, she said; she knew those guys. And she showed us how her other characters knew her men: sometimes in anger, sometimes in strife, always with great interest. She turned the mirror of the world—her world—on them, and in doing so forced her male characters to do what black men weren’t supposed to do very well in real life: stay, if only for a time. And by having them stay, they changed things, even if they were crazy, like Shadrack, in “Sula” (1973), or the doomed Plum, in the same novel, or the tyrannical Macon Dead II, in “Song of Solomon” (1977), or the dead Bill Cosey, in “Love” (2003), or Frank Money, a latter-day Odysseus searching for his sister, in “Home” (2012). The point is the men were engaged, seen.
  In “Tar Baby” (1981), we meet Jadine, a black fashion model who falls in love with Son, a renegade soul. Class, one of the great, unexplored subjects in our disparate black American life, is what separates them, ultimately, but I don’t think even Morrison’s pal, James Baldwin, saw that. In an interview that Baldwin gave with Quincy Troupe toward the end of his life, he said that Toni was an allegorist, but that’s not really true. Baldwin came of age as a novelist during the days of “From Here to Eternity” and “The Naked and the Dead”—an epoch defined by “muscular prose” and stories steeped in realism. Baldwin got lost in Toni’s atmosphere, which she sometimes got lost in, too. In a 1981 interview, she said, “I must confess, though, that I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals. I think I exercise tremendous restraint in this, but my editor says, ‘Would you stop this beauty business.’ And I say, ‘Wait, wait until I tell you about these ants.’ ”
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  Ciaran Carson’s Urgent, Hopeful, Final Lines
  By Kevin Young
  Toni, an avid gardener, was a naturalist in a world where nature had been abused, and used for commerce, just as the bodies that harvested it were used for commerce. Nature appears through the cracks of many of her books. Sometimes flowers don’t grow in her stories, because life is stunted in one place; sometimes the junk surrounding junked lives becomes a kind of garden. Close your eyes and remember poor doomed Pecola Breedlove at the end of “The Bluest Eye,” pecking among all that broken glass, with her dream of beauty—white beauty—contributing to her downfall. Or the outrageously lush landscape that makes up the ground at Isle des Chevaliers, in “Tar Baby,” or the woods and plain in “A Mercy” (2008): the outside world is beautiful and remains beautiful, even after we get our hands on it. Sometimes, when I read her, I think of that extraordinary remark by Diane Arbus, when she described the beauty and despair she found when photographing in nudist colonies: “It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the Fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation had said, ‘All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up.’ And they did.”
  Toni’s greatness as a novelist had a lot to do with her skill—her great ability—to show how we mucked up the landscape, not just in the world but in ourselves. Slavery was one way we mucked it up, of course, and the enormous wound at the center of “Beloved” (1988) has to do with how slavery not only killed bodies but made a mess of our minds, thus creating a particularly American way of thinking. Because of this history, Toni’s characters live in her stories and stand outside of the action at the same time. Her late masterpiece, “A Mercy,” is a novel about the mental institution of slavery in this country, but, on another level, the book is about voices and how those voices fill a new American landscape with difference: We all came from somewhere else, so what makes an American? One of the more powerful voices in “A Mercy” belongs to Florens, a young woman whose search for love leads her to some pretty dangerous places, including a deep vulnerability of the heart. You can hear it in her voice, especially after her lover, the Blacksmith, leaves her on the plantation where she’s a slave.
  Since your leaving with no goodbye, summer passes, then autumn, and with the waning of winter the sickness comes back. Not like before with Sorrow but with Sir . . . You probably don’t know anything at all about what your back looks like whatever the sky holds: sunlight, moonrise. I rest there. My hand, my eyes, my mouth. The first time I see it you are shaping fire with bellows. The shine of water runs down your spine and I have shock at myself for wanting to lick there.
  Toni’s Florens is an imagined voice rooted in the author’s brilliant ability and desire to feel what flesh feels like outside one’s own experience, and what it takes for love to survive, even when it’s been left. Her work is a more-than-credible argument for the power of invention. “Stop thinking about saving your face,” she said, in her 1993 Nobel Prize speech. “And tell us your particularized world. Make up a story.” She made up stories, all right, tales she developed within a distinctly literary context. Indeed, she’s not given enough credit for being a high modernist, the equal to the modernists she admired and wrote about in graduate school: Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. She also adored Gabriel García Márquez, another novelist who was interested in the corrosive and redemptive power of natural phenomena, plant life, and the earth. Once she asked me what I thought of his work. I confessed that I hadn’t read it in a long time. She smiled, and said, “Me? I gobble it all up.”
  What these artists have in common, of course, is a grandness of intention shaped by certain ideas of what fiction can do and should do for the reader of literary books. From the beginning, Toni was working on several levels at once, but complexity of thought—ideas in fiction—was chief among her concerns. Nearly equal to that was the desire to find the plasticity in language, that which can bend and flow with a character’s thoughts and feelings. This is different from being postmodernist. As a postmodernist, she would have had to intrude on the story with her own observations and comments, and where would the fiction be in that? If she were going to create a fractured world, as she did in “Jazz” (1992), the fracture had to exist in whole cloth, so to speak, which is to say within a narrative that she shaped and controlled.
  She believed that storytelling was the best way “to learn anything.” Part of what readers respond to in her work is how she gives them the copyright on their own lives. And she created the illusion, at times, that her characters arrived at your doorstep, full-blown. (She used to joke that Pilate, in “Song of Solomon,” was so powerful a presence when she was writing her novel that she had to remind the brilliant matriarch that it was her book.) But not one of them could have found their freedom without her extraordinary discipline. It was the discipline underlying her craft that allowed us to hear her fictional citizens as they talked to one another and themselves, thus allowing Toni’s readers to talk to and listen to themselves, as well.
  Still, no matter the individual isolation of Toni’s characters, they are generally given the opportunity to speak to someone else; this was one way she showed us their complexity in the world. Claudia and Pecola, in “The Bluest Eye”; Nel and Sula, in “Sula”; Milkman and Guitar, in “Song of Solomon”; Jadine and Son, in “Tar Baby”; Sethe and Denver and Beloved, in “Beloved”; Joe and Violet and Dorcas, in “Jazz”; the women in “Paradise”—all of these beings are alone together and made up of a multiplicity of intention, of hate and love, creation and destruction, hope and crap. Sometimes the love is strongest between two men, sometimes between two women, and sometimes, now, I wonder what it would have been like for her to create a world that was as fluid as her language, one where gender wasn’t seen in opposition to or in support of itself and just was. What an interesting, provocative thing to say, she might have said. And then she would have tucked the idea away, maybe, to make use of at a later date, perhaps, in yet another one-of-a-kind of novel.

  Hilton Als, a staff writer at The New Yorker, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He is the author of “White Girls” and an associate professor of writing at Columbia University.Read more »

Morrison, Toni GOODNESS AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION Univ. of Virginia (Adult Nonfiction) $27.95 10, 15 ISBN: 978-0-8139-4362-6
The Nobel Prize-winning author's lecture at the Harvard Divinity School as well as a rich collection of scholarly illumination of the religious dimensions of her fiction.
In 2012, Morrison (The Source of Self-Regard: Essays, Speeches, Meditations, 2019, etc.) was invited to give the 95th annual Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard. Those exploring her work were not literary critics and scholars but a pan-disciplinary group of "scholars of religion, history, theology, and ethics." According to the editors' introduction, "Morrison's work has become a kind of sacred text, and reading her a spiritual practice for many." The close readings of her work in these critical essays build strong cases for such a focus while never subverting the purely literary value of her work or reducing it to theological dogma. Her lecture provides the starting point: "Goodness: Altruism and the Literary Imagination" shows how the novel, which once reflected a world in balance--"Dickens, Hardy, and Austen all left their readers with a sense of the restoration of order and the triumph of virtue"--has changed dramatically. Now, she writes, "Evil has a blockbuster audience; Goodness lurks backstage. Evil has vivid speech; Goodness bites its tongue." As these essays suggest, Morrison has addressed evil throughout her fiction and has steeped her work in it while also meeting its challenge with love and a spirit of redemption. "Religion and the religious dimensions of African American life permeate her novels, sometimes in Christian tones, sometimes in African tones, always through the strange stuff of existence," writes David Carrasco in "The Ghost of Love and Goodness." A Mexican American historian of religion at Harvard, Carrasco provides a bookend to the lecture with his 2017 interview with Morrison, which reflects on the lecture and its themes and her powerful assessment of slavery as "the story [of] people who were treated like beasts [but] did not become beastly." Instead, they created "a culture that this country could not do without."
A volume that attests to Morrison's singularity, with a cultural resonance that extends well beyond literature.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Morrison, Toni: GOODNESS AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A596269928/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7f0df05c. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A596269928

Morrison, Toni THE SOURCE OF SELF-REGARD Knopf (Adult Nonfiction) $27.95 2, 13 ISBN: 978-0-525-52103-7
Brilliantly incisive essays, speeches, and meditations considering race, power, identity, and art.
A prominent public intellectual even before being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, novelist Morrison (Emerita, Humanities/Princeton Univ.; The Origin of Others, 2017, etc.) has lectured and written about urgent social and cultural matters for more than four decades. Her latest collection gathers more than 40 pieces (including her Nobel lecture), revealing the passion, compassion, and profound humanity that distinguish her writing. Freedom, dignity, and responsibility recur as salient issues. Speaking to the Sarah Lawrence graduating class in 1988, Morrison urges her listeners to go beyond "an intelligent encounter with problem-solving" to engage in dreaming. "Not the activity of the sleeping brain, but rather the activity of a wakened, alert one" that can foster empathy--a sense of intimacy that "should precede our decision-making, our cause-mongering, our action." To graduates of Barnard in 1979 she recasts the fairy tale of "Cinderella," focusing on the women who exploit and oppress the heroine, to urge her audience to "pay as much attention to our nurturing sensibilities as to our ambition." "In wielding the power that is deservedly yours," she adds, "don't permit it to enslave your stepsisters." In an adroit--and chillingly prescient--political critique published in the Nation in 1995, she warns of the complicity between racism and fascism, perceiving a culture where fear, denial, and complacency prevail and where "our intelligence [is] sloganized, our strength downsized, our privacy auctioned." "Fascism talks ideology," she writes, "but it is really just marketing--marketing for power." Speaking at Princeton in 1998, she considers the linguistic and moral challenges she faced in writing Paradise, one of many pieces offering insights into her fiction. Aiming to produce "race-specific race-free prose," she confronted the problem of writing about personal identity "in a language in which the codes of racial hierarchy and disdain are deeply embedded"--as well as the problem of writing about the intellectually complex idea of paradise "in an age of theme parks."
Powerful, highly compelling pieces from one of our greatest writers.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Morrison, Toni: THE SOURCE OF SELF-REGARD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2018. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A563598597/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e73f36ed. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A563598597

Toni Morrison is such a peerless, masterful storyteller that it is easy to forget she is also one of our most engaged and engaging public intellectuals. Her new collection of essays and speeches, The Source of Self-Regard (Knopf, $28.95, 368 pages, 9780525521037), reminds us of the breadth and depth of her concerns. Morrison ruminates on and illuminates the political, racial, social and literary issues that have long informed her work with a singular combination of curiosity and confidence.
Because many of the 40-plus pieces Morrison gathers here were first delivered as speeches at conferences and commencements, they tend to be short, yet brevity does not preclude remarkable expansiveness of thought. This volume is divided into three sections: The first explores political and moral realities through the lens of globalism, racism and the sources and meanings of identity. The second section, anchored by the longest and weightiest pieces in the book, is self-explanatorily called "Black Matter(s)." The final section, "God's Language," offers meditations on art and literature (both Morrison's own and others'). These organizing divisions can prove imprecise, however--it is impossible for this deep-seeing writer to stop the seepage of her vast and broad concerns between one section and the next. And we would not want her to.
Morrison considers the work of a disparate array of fellow writers, including James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Chinua Achebe and Toni Cade Bambara. She parses works such as Beowulf, Cinderella and American slave narratives. Yet it is in the moments when she offers glimpses into the genesis of her own remarkable fiction that the magic of what might be called Morrison's "reverse prism" takes hold, as she reveals how all of the scattered rays from her pursuit of understanding converge into the laser point of her narratives. "We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom," she writes in the title essay. "And if we agree that purposeful progression exists, then you'll see at once how dispiriting this project of drawing or building or constructing fiction out of history can be... how quickly we can forget that wisdom without knowledge, wisdom without data, is just a hunch."
As with any such collection of pieces spanning decades, The Source of Self-Regard contains repetitions, and interest may ebb and flow with a reader's individual concerns. But ever-present in this collection is the consistency of vision and the powerful writing that readers have come to expect from the inestimable talent of this American original as she continues to navigate the thorny task of integrating history, of creating art, of learning to belong.
Robert Weibezahl is a publishing industry veteran, playwright and novelist. Each month, he takes an in-depth look at a recent book of literary significance.
by robert weibezahl

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 BookPage
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Weibezahl, Robert. "The Source of Self-Regard: A new collection of essays and speeches from Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison solidifies her legacy as one of America's most thoughtful and important writers." BookPage, Feb. 2019, p. 8. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A570439441/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=482ab11c. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A570439441

Toni Morrison, America's most decorated living novelist, has held a remarkably consistent polemical perspective throughout her four decades in public life: "Our past is bleak," she writes in her 1976 lecture "Moral Inhabitants", "Our future dim." This sentiment echoes across the Nobel Prize winner's non-fiction anthology, Mouth Full of Blood, and a career providing thoughtful counterblasts to United States triumphalism.
Unlike many in liberal America similarly troubled by the consequences of war, borders, poverty and globalisation, Morrison finds antecedents for our present ills that pre-date Donald Trump's ascent to the White House, the 2008 financial crash and even 9/11. Like Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, Morrison cannot help but look to the past, observing one continuous catastrophe; longing to awaken the dead, she sees state boundaries drawn through mass graves, architecture supported "on the spines of women and children", meadows fertilised with "the nutrients of ... citizens' skeletons".
She baulks at the ideological origins of the American Revolution, identifying a new democracy born not in an "Age of Enlightenment" but an "Age of Scientific Racism" whose intellectual forefathers (Hume, Kant, Jefferson) judged black people like herself as "incapable of intelligence" and laid the groundwork for their persecution. Morrison's willingness to interrogate the republic's foundational crimes--the genocide of indigenous peoples, the commercial trade in African slaves, and the violence meted out to their descendants--makes it all the more remarkable that, at 88 years old, she has succeeded in becoming an American national treasure: recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom; four-time beneficiary of Oprah's Book Club; a pillar of school and university curricula.
The "essays, speeches, meditations" in Mouth Full of Blood demonstrate the writer's enduring eagerness to examine the contradictions of being both "native" and "alien" to her own country. How does one act in the knowledge that their "metier" is black yet "'American' means 'white"'? She takes pride in challenging a traditional literary canon unshaped by the 400-year presence of "Africanistic" people in the United States. In "The Foreigner's Home" Morrison chides white writers who go out of their way to portray the black experience, only to infantilise it--whether those such as Joseph Conrad or Doris Lessing who believe Africa to be "a dark continent in desperate need of light", or those, in the case of fellow US Nobel Laureates Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow, who characterise it as an "inexhaustible playground for tourists".
In a tribute to the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, Morrison describes how in 1965 while working on her first novel, The Bluest Eye, she began to devour portraits of Africa written by Africans. Employed as an editor at Random House, she would play a key role in releasing anthologies of African authors at a time when they lacked visibility in bookshops and on "world literature" courses. Morrison's debut (finally published in 1970) set in the author's birthplace of Lorain, Ohio, was conceived in part because she felt that "vulnerable young black girls" were absent from literary texts ("no one it seemed took them seriously except me").
In a number of lectures, notably "The Slavebody and the Blackbody" delivered at the Black Holocaust Museum during the first year of the new millennium, Morrison sets out to articulate that "unspeakable part of American history"--the transatlantic slave trade--drawing parallels with slippery forms of contemporary racism such as a private prisons system where black people "become once again free labour; once again corralled for profit". Unafraid to weave a grand historical tapestry--illustrated by her masterly sweep through pre-modern slave societies, incorporating eastern European serfdom, Visigothic Spain, medieval Ghana, English feudalism and countless others, Morrison's paramount interest lies with the "interior lives" of those denied liberty.
Inspired by autobiographical slave narratives--more than a hundred of which were published during the 18th and 19th centuries to assert the humanity of their black authors while arguing the case for abolition--Morrison admits wanting to "extend, fill in, and complement" the private stories of individuals once held in bondage, rather than writing about the institution of slavery. Recalling a newspaper cutting concerning one Margaret Garner, Morrison transcribes her tale into what would become her most revered novel: the 1988 Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved.
This collection exhibits the sincerity with which Toni Morrison believes in the perpetual power of radical writing. "I sometimes think how glorious it must have been to have written drama in 16th-century England, or poetry in Greece before Christ, or religious narrative in 1000 AD," she says, "when literature was need."

As an exemplary literary theorist, Morrison is as lucid critiquing Gertrude Stein or William Faulkner as drawing allusions from Beowulf or Cinderella--referencing Fredric Jameson and FR Leavis in one lecture; Henri Bergson and HG Wells a few pages later. As a black woman writer wanting to encourage a wider vocabulary than the one in which she was educated (described in the penultimate lecture "Goodbye to All That") she eschews picking sides in any "politics versus art" debate, favouring instead a "union of aesthetics and ethics".
The collection takes occasional steps into uncomfortable territory--for example, the 1989 lecture "Women, Race, and Memory" condemns women's liberation organisations for abandoning black civil rights and describes internecine feminist skirmishes as akin to "a hair-pulling contest". Yet at every stage, the reader is grateful for an author allowing, encouraging even, such intimate access to their work, thought and reflections on eternal concepts: knowledge, "separateness", the future of time.
Regarding the latter, for all her justified pessimism, Morrison faintly entertains the possibility of a future as far-reaching as the past, shaped by those who have been "pressed to the margins". Should we see an end to our "current disequilibria", she suggests, we may discover that "history is not dead, but that it is about to take its first unfettered breath".
Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations
Toni Morrison
Chatto & Windus, 368pp, 20 [pounds sterling]
Caption: Toni Morrison interrogates America's crimes MARIELA LOMB/ALAMY
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Biswas, K. "Mouth Full of Blood: the unapologetic essays of Toni Morrison: Essays, speeches and meditations from America's most decorated living novelist." New Statesman, 1 Mar. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A594429473/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0ebd140e. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A594429473

The Origin of Others
By Toni Morrison
Harvard University Press, 136 pp., $22.95
Hers "was not a story to pass on," but one to be forgotten, an easy enough thing to do since there was nothing left of her to remember except "the one word her mother could have afforded to have inscribed on her tombstone, Beloved." And yet her footprints still "come and go, come and go," just as Toni Morrison promised.

They appear this time in the pages of Morrison's latest excavation of the Western canon in search of the origin of others, where readers rediscover "Beloved the girl, the haunter, [who] is the ultimate Other." Far more is represented by the ghost of Morrison's "speaking, thinking dead child" in Beloved than the "sixty million and more" dead African slaves to whom the novel is dedicated. In this new work, Morrison continues to grapple with the savagery and gothic sensibilities of slavery and still has much to say about the relics of people left in its wake.
The Origin of Others is a critical literary and cultural analysis of Western literature's role in determining the way the culture perceives difference. In these essays, Morrison provides the same kind of "controlled wilderness" that she uses to create experiences of otherness in her fiction, fusing rich details and depth of perception to position the reader to relate to others "with sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination."
Those familiar with Morrison's works will notice her return to the theme of "the foreigner's home," a concept she's been mulling over since she was guest curator at the Louvre Museum in 2006. And the matter of "how the construction of blackness ... allows whites to explore their own bodies through the surrogacy of a debased Other" was explored in her 1992 work Playing in the Dark. The book is based on her 2016 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University on "the literature of belonging," and the sense of belonging is the heart of the matter, an emotional thread that Morrison knots at the beginning of the book with a personal story of when she first learned about not belonging. It was the moment her great-grandmother, "staring at me and my sister ... frowned, pointed her cane at us, and said, 'These children have been tampered with.'" With those few words, "the damage was done"--she and her sister went from being children playing on the floor to something sullied, impure, "lesser, if not completely Other." This story to set the context for her analysis of words for the invention of others, exemplifying how "Othering" occurs as linguistic acts that have both personal and social implications.
Othering has a long history that Morrison extends back to the eugenics of scientific racism, in which the concept of race became something other than simply a classification of species. Although the human race is the only proper scientific designation for all people, scientific racism has provided much fodder for a "racial-ized ranking of people" based on such arbitrary differences as culture, physical traits, religion, etc.
Morrison suggests that the real damage was done when these pseudo-scientific configurations of otherness became concretized in classic Western literature, from the colonially controlled "literary Africa" to the ideologically imbued characterizations of others by such greats as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Even in a work like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which many regard as critical of slavery, Morrison finds evidence of efforts to "romance slavery" and perpetuate a view of the enslaved as "the Other."
Only in certain representations of the stranger, as in Flannery O'Connor's short story "The Artificial Nigger," does Morrison find in Western literature an honest attempt to address the process of inventing Others and its motivations. When O'Connor's protagonist, Mr. Head, uses a day trip to Atlanta to teach his young nephew racism, it signifies to Morrison a profoundly perceptive reading of the social and psychological function of the stranger for securing the status of white superiority.
Defining one's self by estranging others is a human tendency, and Morrison admits her own vulnerability to it even as she discusses her attempts to break free of it in her novels Bluest Eye, Paradise, God Help the Child, and Beloved. This is perhaps one reason why Ta-Nehisi Coates, in the book's foreword, places Morrison "among those who understand the hold [this] history has on us all."
Morrison underscores the implications of othering in a globalized world, where she estimates that the number of the displaced "far surpasses sixty million." That this figure matches her calculation of the enslaved is hardly a coincidence, especially given other equally significant similarities between today's "transglobal tread of peoples" and the mass movement of the Atlantic slave trade.
Fighting against the horror of history possibly repeating itself, Morrison sets out "to use literature to comment on the bane (the poison) of foreignness" and "de-fang cheap racism." Tracing the origin of others through Western literature allows her to discern within the present sociopolitical and economic pressures of globalization "the inside/outside blur that can enshrine frontiers and borders--real, metaphorical, and psychological--as we wrestle with definitions of nation, state, and citizenship as well as the ongoing problems of racism and race relations, and the so-called clash of cultures in our search to belong." For others past and present (not least of which are the "sixty million and more" refugees and victims of human trafficking), Morrison wants to demystify the dangerous dystopia that emerges at "the borders, the porous places, the vulnerable points where the concept of home is seen as being menaced by foreigners."
For those who want to understand better the process of inventing others, its literary past, and the tendency in us all to dismiss others clamoring for a sense of belonging, The Origin of Others is a must-read. Morrison's fans will appreciate her hauntingly clear reading of the times, even while she remains true to her literary aesthetic. New readers can look to this text as a foray into the mind of one of the greatest thinkers of our time. With the same revolutionary simplicity as Martin Buber's I and Thou, Morrison reminds us once again that whatever can be said of the self is always determined by how one stands in relation to the other--a point poignantly articulated in the epigraph of Beloved: "Those who were not my people I will call 'my people,' and her who was not beloved I will call 'beloved'" (Rom. 9:25).
Reviewed by Audrey Thompson, who teaches rhetoric, composition, African American studies, and women's studies at Penn State Behrend.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Christian Century Foundation
http://www.christiancentury.org
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Thompson, Audrey. "The Origin of Others." The Christian Century, 11 Oct. 2017, p. 40+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A511454698/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d6ae1f65. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A511454698

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Morrison, Toni THE ORIGIN OF OTHERS Harvard Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $22.95 9, 18 ISBN: 978-0-674-97645-0
Essays focused on an overarching question: "What is race (other than genetic imagination), and why does it matter?"Melding memoir, history, and trenchant literary analysis, Nobel Prize laureate Morrison (Emeritus, Humanities/Princeton Univ.; God Help the Child, 2015, etc.) offers perceptive reflections on the configuration of Otherness. Revised from her Norton Lectures at Harvard, the volume consists of six essays that consider how race is conceived, internalized, and culturally transmitted, drawing in part on writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Joseph Conrad, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the African writer Camara Laye, whose novel The Radiance of the King Morrison greatly admires. Laye told the story of a white man, stranded and destitute in Africa, struggling to maintain his assumptions of white privilege. For Morrison, the novel illuminates the pressures that "make us deny the foreigner in ourselves and make us resist to the death the commonness of humanity." She also offers insightful glosses into her own aims as a novelist. "Narrative fiction," she writes, "provides a controlled wilderness, an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination." In Beloved, for example, she reimagined the story of Margaret Garner, a slave who had killed her children rather than see them enslaved, as she had been. In A Mercy, she examined "the journey from sympathetic race relations to violent ones fostered by religion." In Paradise, she delved into the issue of hierarchies of blackness by looking at "the contradictory results of devising a purely raced community"; she purposely did not identify her characters' race in order to "simultaneously de-fang and theatricalize race, signaling, I hoped, how moveable and hopelessly meaningless the construct was." In God Help the Child, Morrison considered "the triumphalism and deception that colorism fosters." Her current novel in progress, she discloses, explores "the education of a racist--how does one move from a non-racial womb to the womb of racism"? As sharp and insightful as one would expect from this acclaimed author.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Morrison, Toni: THE ORIGIN OF OTHERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A495428074/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=56cc45f0. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495428074

Morrison, Toni GOD HELP THE CHILD Knopf (Adult Fiction) $24.95 4, 21 ISBN: 978-0-307-59417-4
Brutality, racism and lies are relieved by moments of connection in Morrison's latest.A little girl is born with skin so black her mother will not touch her. Desperate for approval, to just once have her mother take her hand, she tells a lie that puts an innocent schoolteacher in jail for decades. Later, the ebony-skinned girl will change her name to Bride, wear only white, become a cosmetics entrepreneur, drive a Jaguar. Her lover, a man named Booker, also bears a deep scar on his soul--his older brother was abducted, tortured and murdered by a pedophilic serial killer. This is a skinny, fast-moving novel filled with tragic incidents, most sketched in a few haunting sentences: "The last time Booker saw Adam he was skateboarding down the sidewalk in twilight, his yellow T-shirt fluorescent under the Northern Ash trees." When Bride's falsely accused teacher is released from prison, there's a new round of trouble. Booker leaves, Bride goes after him--and ends up in the woods, recovering from a car accident with hippie survivalists who have adopted a young girl abused by her prostitute mother. Meanwhile, Bride is anxiously watching her own body metamorphose into that of a child--her pubic hair has vanished, her chest has flattened, her earlobes are smooth. As in the darkest fairy tales, there will be fire and death. There will also be lobster salad, Smartwater and Louis Vuitton; the mythic aspects of this novel are balanced by moments like the one in which Bride decides that the song that most represents her relationship with Booker is "I Wanna Dance with Somebody." A chilling oracle and a lively storyteller, Nobel winner Morrison continues the work she began 45 years ago with The Bluest Eye.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Morrison, Toni: GOD HELP THE CHILD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2015. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A397059661/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=142a632c. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A397059661

* Morrison, Toni. God Help the Child. Knopf. Apr. 2015. 192p. ISBN 9780307594174. $24.95. ebk. ISBN 9780307399779. F
In her latest book, Nobel laureate Morrison shows us how we hold onto our pain and let it define us, pulling back on her often liquidly lyric style to offer powerful portraits in lean prose. Sweetness, who is from a family whose members can pass for white, gives birth to the midnight-black Lula Ann and raises her at an ashamed and bitter distance, which she rationalizes will toughen her up. As a child, Lula Ann gains some favor from her mother by helping to put away a teacher named Sofia, who is accused of sexually abusing her charges. As an adult who renames herself Bride, Lula Ann becomes a successful, traffic-stoppingly beautiful career woman. But her life starts falling apart when she meets with a just-paroled Sofia. Then Booker, with whom she's been conducting a passionate affair, leaves without explanation. Serious-minded Booker cannot leave behind a terrible family tragedy, and as Bride pursues him for answers to his abandonment, they are both transformed in more ways than one. VERDICT There are some moves here that may seem obvious, but the pieces all fit together seamlessly in a story about beating back the past, confronting the present, and understanding one's worth. [See Prepub Alert, 11/17/14.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
Hoffert, Barbara
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hoffert, Barbara. "Morrison, Toni. God Help the Child." Library Journal, 15 Mar. 2015, p. 94. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A405924368/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7994ea4d. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A405924368

Morrison, Toni PLEASE, LOUISE Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (Children's Picture Books) $17.99 3, 4 ISBN: 978-1-4169-8338-5
A young girl sets out on a solitary walk to a surprise destination. With rain threatening, a little girl leaves home by herself wearing bright yellow boots and a slicker. The streets are filled with fearful sights and sounds-a barking dog, a darkened house, a junkyard and a statue of a bird of prey. But then light and shelter from the storm fill the pages as Louise enters a well-stocked library where "Imagination is an open door. / Step in here and let it soar." Louise comfortably stretches out on a rainbow-hued floor to read before walking home, passing the now-friendly dog and people sitting on the steps of the house, now shining brightly in the sun. She sits in front of her own house surrounded by books and then goes inside to settle herself in a cozy window seat to read. The Morrisons, mother and son, write in rhyming couplets with the message firmly hammered home: "[B]ooks can teach and please Louise." Adult readers may find this disconcerting: A child alone on dark and scary streets finds comfort solely from books (even library staff are nowhere to be seen). Strickland's watercolor-and-gouache paintings are delicate, detailed and beautiful. Louise is a lovely child and a poster girl for reading. Still, that there appear to be no caring adults in her world is troubling. An ode to reading that raises too many concerns. (Picture book. 4-7)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Morrison, Toni: PLEASE, LOUISE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2014. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A358425189/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=790eaa0c. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A358425189

Please, Louise
Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison, illus, by Shadra Strickland. S&S/Wisema n,
$17.99
(32p) ISBN 978-1-4169-8338-5
The Morrisons (The Tortoise or the Hare) don't just champion the act of reading: they explain what it does. Reading is valuable, they explain, because it banishes fear. "Scary thoughts are your creation/ when you have no information." Louise, an Asian girl, sets out for the library in a yellow rain slicker. The trip is scattered with threats: a strange man hunched over a harmonica, a deserted house with dark windows. The narrator pleads with Louise to think clearly instead of reacting reflexively: "Is that house really haunted? Or does it just need care?/Why not imagine the joy that used to be there?" When Louise enters the library, its shelves open wide around her in an embrace. Strickland (White Water) paints a moving portrait of Louise in tight close-up, completely absorbed in reading. On the way home, the change in Louise's attitude is reflected in what she sees. While it's hard to fault the message that books can open minds and perspectives, the delivery suffers from a cajoling narrative tone and an overall roughness to the verse. Ages 4-8. Illustrator's agent: Lori Nowicki, Painted Words. (Mar.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Please, Louise." Publishers Weekly, 16 Dec. 2013, p. 57. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A354575851/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ac8399b5. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A354575851

HOME
TONI MORRISON
Knopf
Nobel literature prize laureate Toni Morrison revisits familiar themes of race, gender, prejudice, betrayal and redemption in her new novel, Home. At 146 pages, the slender volume is easily read in one sitting and is infused with the suspense, flashbacks, mysticism, melodrama and otherworldly characters that were hallmarks of the popular 1950s-era television show The Twilight Zone.
Set in the 1950s, the narrative centres on Frank Money, a black Korean War veteran. Raised in Georgia, Frank has returned to the United States via Seattle. He is mentally scarred by his stint in the army and ill-equipped to flourish in a country shackled by the bigotry that Martin Luther King, Jr. would later address in his landmark 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech.

Despite his myriad frustrations--"whatever the world's palette, his shame and its fury exploded," Morrison writes--Frank is determined to reach his ailing younger sister Cee, who is employed by a nefarious white physician in Atlanta. "If [Cee] died because some arrogant, evil doctor sliced her up, war memories would pale beside what [Frank] would do to him," Morrison writes. "Even if it took the rest of his life, even if he spent the balance of it in prison."
After a hellish journey, Frank rescues Cee and delivers her to nearby Lotus, their close-knit childhood community. There, she is nursed by a devoted group of older black women whose remedy for "womb sickness" includes calamus root, quilting, singing, biscuits slathered with blackberry jam and daily doses of sunshine.
In Cee's ascent from life-threatening illness to vibrant health, readers will find echoes of the "love your flesh" passages from Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved. Here, an elder offers Cee counsel: "Look to yourself. You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.... You young and a woman and there's serious limitation in both, but you a person too.. Locate her and let her do some good in the world."
As for Frank, his odyssey with Cee gives him the courage to confront the secrets that have damned him. "I have to tell the truth," Morrison writes, yet again.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Herizons Magazine, Inc.
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
White, Evelyn C. "Home." Herizons, Fall 2012, p. 37. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A306240581/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=872e3de9. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A306240581

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Home By Toni Morrison Knopf, 160 pp., $24.00
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison's 10th novel, Home, explicitly picks up on a theme that has been crucial to both her fiction and her nonfiction over several decades: the idea of making a home within a divided nation. In this novel, Frank Money, a Korean War veteran, travels from Seattle to the small town in Georgia where he was raised, a place that he has long loathed and associated only with violence, rejection and personal misery. He is on a mission, he believes, to save his little sister from unknown peril. Home is a short book that does not have the full character and plot development of most of Morrison's work. It reads partly like an allegory, partly like an elegy for a rural southern way of life, partly like a meditation on redemption, but its individual pieces do not fully cohere and the characters seem like shadows moving across a stage; just as we feel we are about to get to know them, they disappear. On the other hand, Morrison's writing is luminous, and anywhere you open it, the book has individual sentences that sing.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 The Christian Century Foundation
http://www.christiancentury.org
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Home." The Christian Century, 5 Sept. 2012, p. 41. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A303073880/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=12d47fde. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A303073880

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) "Morrison, Toni: GOODNESS AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A596269928/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7f0df05c. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019. Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) "Morrison, Toni: THE SOURCE OF SELF-REGARD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2018. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A563598597/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e73f36ed. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019. Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Weibezahl, Robert. "The Source of Self-Regard: A new collection of essays and speeches from Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison solidifies her legacy as one of America's most thoughtful and important writers." BookPage, Feb. 2019, p. 8. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A570439441/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=482ab11c. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019. Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Biswas, K. "Mouth Full of Blood: the unapologetic essays of Toni Morrison: Essays, speeches and meditations from America's most decorated living novelist." New Statesman, 1 Mar. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A594429473/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0ebd140e. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019. Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Thompson, Audrey. "The Origin of Others." The Christian Century, 11 Oct. 2017, p. 40+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A511454698/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d6ae1f65. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019. Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) "Morrison, Toni: THE ORIGIN OF OTHERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A495428074/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=56cc45f0. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019. Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) "Morrison, Toni: GOD HELP THE CHILD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2015. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A397059661/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=142a632c. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019. Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Hoffert, Barbara. "Morrison, Toni. God Help the Child." Library Journal, 15 Mar. 2015, p. 94. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A405924368/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7994ea4d. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019. Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) "Morrison, Toni: PLEASE, LOUISE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2014. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A358425189/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=790eaa0c. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019. Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) "Please, Louise." Publishers Weekly, 16 Dec. 2013, p. 57. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A354575851/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ac8399b5. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019. Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) White, Evelyn C. "Home." Herizons, Fall 2012, p. 37. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A306240581/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=872e3de9. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019. Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) "Home." The Christian Century, 5 Sept. 2012, p. 41. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A303073880/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=12d47fde. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019.

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