Toni Morrison

For the Louisiana politician, see deLesseps Morrison, Jr..

Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison in 2008
Born	February 18, 1931 (1931-02-18) (age 80) Lorain, Ohio, United States
Occupation	Novelist, Writer
Genres	African American literature
Notable work(s)	Beloved, Song of Solomon
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1988
Influences James Baldwin, William Faulkner, Doris Lessing, Herman Melville
Influenced Bell Hooks , Octavia Butler
Signature

Toni Morrison (born Chloe Anthony Wofford^[1] on February 18, 1931) is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved. She also was commissioned to write the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, first performed in 2005.

Early life and career

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

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

In 1958 she married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect and fellow faculty member at Howard University. They had two children, Harold and Slade, and divorced in 1964. After the divorce she moved to Syracuse, New York, where she worked as a textbook editor. A year and a half later, she went to work as an editor at the New York City headquarters of Random House.^[4] As an editor, Morrison played a vital role in bringing black literature into the mainstream, editing books by authors such as Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Gayl Jones.^[5]

Writing career

Toni Morrison at the Miami Book Fair International of 1986

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

In 1975 her novel Sula (1973) was nominated for the National Book Award. Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), brought her national attention. The book was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 1987 Morrison's novel Beloved became a critical success. When the novel failed to win the National Book Award as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, a number of writers protested over the omission.^[4][7] Shortly afterward, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the American Book Award. That same year, Morrison took a visiting professorship at Bard College.

Beloved was adapted into the 1998 film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. Morrison later used Margaret Garner's life story again in the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, with music by Richard Danielpour. In May 2006, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best American novel published in the previous twenty-five years.

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

In 1996 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.^[9] Morrison's lecture, entitled "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations,"^[10] began with the aphorism, "Time, it seems, has no future." She cautioned against the misuse of history to diminish expectations of the future.^[11]

Morrison was honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which is awarded to a writer "who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work."^[12]

Although her novels typically concentrate on black women, Morrison does not identify her works as feminist.^[13] She has stated that she thinks "it's off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I'm involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don't subscribe to patriarchy, and I don't think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it's a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things."^[13]

In addition to her novels, Morrison has also co-written books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison, who worked as a painter and musician. Slade died on December 22, 2010, aged 45.^[14]

Later life

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

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

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

In November 2006, Morrison visited the Louvre Museum in Paris as the second in its "Grand Invité" program to guest-curate a month-long series of events across the arts on the theme of "The Foreigner's Home." Inspired by her curatorship, Morrison returned to Princeton in Fall 2008 to lead a small seminar, also entitled "The Foreigner's Home."

In May 2010, Morrison appeared at PEN World Voices for a conversation with Marlene van Niekerk and Kwame Anthony Appiah about South African literature, and specifically, van Niekerk's novel, Agaat.^[15]

In May 2011, Morrison received an Honorable Doctor of Letters Degree from Rutgers University during commencement where she delivered a speech of the "pursuit of life, liberty, meaningfulness, integrity, and truth".

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

Politics

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

Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.^[16]

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."^[17]

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."^[18] In the Democratic primary contest for the 2008 presidential race, Morrison endorsed Senator Barack Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton,^[19] though expressing admiration and respect for the latter.^[20]

Works

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

Novels

• The Bluest Eye (1970; ISBN 0-452-28706-5)
• Sula (1974; ISBN 1-4000-3343-8)
• Song of Solomon (1977; ISBN 1-4000-3342-X)
• Tar Baby (1981; ISBN 1-4000-3344-6)
• Beloved (1987; ISBN 1-4000-3341-1)
• Jazz (1992; ISBN 1-4000-7621-8)
• Paradise (1997; ISBN 0-679-43374-0)
• Love (2003; ISBN 0-375-40944-0)
• A Mercy (2008; ISBN 978-0-307-26423-7)
• Home (2012)

Children's literature (with Slade Morrison)

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

Short fiction

• "Recitatif" (1983)

Plays

• Dreaming Emmett (performed 1986)
• Desdemona (first performed 15 May 2011 in Vienna)^[21][22][23]

Libretti

• Margaret Garner (first performed May 2005)

Non-fiction

• The Black Book (1974)
• Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)
• Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (editor) (1992)
• Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case (co-editor) (1997)
• Remember: The Journey to School Integration (April 2004)
• What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn C. Denard (April 2008)
• Burn This Book: Essay Anthology, editor (2009)

Articles

• "Introduction." Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. [1885] The Oxford Mark Twain, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. xxxii-xli.

Awards and nominations

Awards

Graffiti of Toni Morrison in the city of Vitoria, in Spain

• 1977 National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon
• 1977 American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award
• 1987-88 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award^[24]
• 1988 Helmerich Award
• 1988 American Book Award for Beloved
• 1988 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations for Beloved
• 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved
• 1988 Frederic G. Melcher Book Award for Beloved. A remark in her acceptance speech that “there is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby” honoring the memory of the human beings forced into slavery and brought to the United States. “There’s no small bench by the road,” led the Toni Morrison Society to begin installing benches at significant sites in the history of slavery in America; the first “bench by the road” was dedicated July 26, 2008 on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, the point of entry for approximately 40 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to British North America.
• 1989 MLA Commonwealth Award in Literature
• 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature
• 1993 Commander of the Arts and Letters, Paris
• 1994 Condorcet Medal, Paris
• 1994 Pearl Buck Award
• 1994 Rhegium Julii Prize for Literature
• 1996 Jefferson Lecture
• 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
• 2000 National Humanities Medal
• 2002 100 Greatest African Americans, list by Molefi Kete Asante.^[25]
• 2005 Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Oxford University. ^[26]
• 2009 Norman Mailer Prize, Lifetime Achievement
• 2011 Honorary Doctor of Letters at Rutgers University Graduation Commencement.
• 2011 Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Geneva.^[27]

Nominations

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

See also

Literature portal

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

References

1. ^ Duvall, John N. (2000). The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 38. ISBN 9780312234027. http://books.google.com/books?id=iHbeC1I_aWUC&pg=PA38. "After all the published biographical information on Morrison agrees that her full name is Chloe Anthony Wofford, so that the adoption of 'Toni' as a substitute for 'Chloe' still honors her given name, if somewhat obliquely. Morrison's middle name, however, was not Anthony; her birth certificate indicates her full name as Chloe Ardelia Wofford, which reveals that Ramah and George Wofford named their daughter for her maternal grandmother, Ardelia Willis." 
2. ^ ^{a b} Dreifus, Claudia (September 11, 1994). "CHLOE WOFFORD Talks about TONI MORRISON". The New York Times. http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/texts/morrison1.html. Retrieved 2007-06-11. 
3. ^ ^{a b} Larson, Susan (April 11, 2007). "Awaiting Toni Morrison". The Times-Picayune. http://www.nola.com/living/t-p/index.ssf?/base/living-8/1176268522309540.xml&coll=1. Retrieved 2007-06-11. 
4. ^ ^{a b c d} Grimes, William (October 8, 1993). "Toni Morrison Is '93 Winner Of Nobel Prize in Literature". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/01/11/home/28957.html. Retrieved 2007-06-11. 
5. ^ Verdelle, A. J. (February 1998). "Paradise found: a talk with Toni Morrison about her new novel - Nobel Laureate's new book, 'Paradise' - Interview". Essence Magazine. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1264/is_n10_v28/ai_20187690/pg_2. Retrieved 2007-06-11. ^{[dead link]}
6. ^ The Bluest Eye at Oprah's Book Club official page
7. ^ Menand, Louis (December 26, 2005). "All That Glitters - Literature's global economy". The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/26/051226crbo_books. Retrieved 2007-06-11. 
8. ^ "New York Home of Toni Morrison Burns". The New York Times. December 26, 1993. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CEED8173BF935A15751C1A965958260. Retrieved 2007-06-11. 
9. ^ Jefferson Lecturers at NEH Website (retrieved January 22, 2009).
10. ^ Toni Morrison, "The Future of Time, Literature and Diminished Expectations," reprinted in Toni Morrison, What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2008), ISBN 9781604730173, pp.170-186.
11. ^ B. Denise Hawkins, "Marvelous Morrison - Toni Morrison - Award-Winning Author Talks About the Future From Some Place in Time," Diverse Online (formerly Black Issues In Higher Education), Jun 17, 2007.
12. ^ National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Presenter of National Book Awards
13. ^ ^{a b} Jaffrey, Zia (February 2, 1998). "The Salon Interview with Toni Morrison". Salon.com. http://www.salon.com/books/int/1998/02/cov_si_02int.html. Retrieved 2007-06-11. 

    Why distance oneself from feminism? 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. I detest and loathe [those categories]. I think it's off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I'm involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don't subscribe to patriarchy, and I don't think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it's a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things.

14. ^ "About the Artist". SladeMorrison.com. http://slademorrison.com. Retrieved 14 May 2011. 
15. ^ Video of Toni Morrison and Marlene van Niekerk in Conversation with Anthony Appiah, 1 May 2010
16. ^ "Talk of the Town: Comment," The New Yorker, October 1998, accessed August 6, 2008.
17. ^ "Congressional Black Caucus," CNSNews.com, October 2001.
18. ^ Sachs, Andrea."10 Questions for Toni Morrison", Time, 7 May 2008.
19. ^ Democracy Now! | Headlines for January 29, 2008
20. ^ Alexander, Elizabeth."Our first black president?, It's worth remembering the context of Toni Morrison's famous phrase about Bill Clinton, so we can retire it, now that Barack Obama is a contender.", Salon.com, January 28, 2008.
21. ^ Wiener Festwochen: Desdemona
22. ^ Thiessen, Erin Russell (May 26, 2011). "Toni Morrison's Desdemona delivers a haunting, powerful "re-membering"". http://www.expatica.com/be/leisure/arts_culture/Desdemona-project_17437.html. Retrieved 2011-10-20. 
23. ^ Winn, Steven (20 October 2011). "Toni Morrison adds twist to 'Desdemona'". http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/19/DDUE1LGVNH.DTL. Retrieved 2011-10-21. 
24. ^ http://www.rfkmemorial.org/legacyinaction/bookawards/
25. ^ Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-963-8.
26. ^ "Oxford University Gazette, 10 February 2005: University Agenda" [1], February 2005.
27. ^ "Dies Academicus 2011" [2],October 2011

External links

• Claudia Brodsky Lacour, Elissa Schappell (Fall 1993). "Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1888/the-art-of-fiction-no-134-toni-morrison. 
• Toni Morrison's oral history video excerpts at The National Visionary Leadership Project
• Literary Encyclopedia biography
• Voices from the Gaps biography
• The Nobel Prize in Literature 1993
• Toni Morrison at Random House Australia
• Review of A Mercy - Centre for Public Christianity
• Web page of Toni Morrison, live and books, CZ
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Toni Morrison on Charlie Rose
• Toni Morrison at the Internet Movie Database
• Toni Morrison collected news and commentary at The Guardian
• Toni Morrison collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Works by or about Toni Morrison in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Works by Toni Morrison on Open Library at the Internet Archive

Persondata
Name	Morrison, Toni
Alternative names
Short description	American novelist
Date of birth	February 18, 1931
Place of birth	Lorain, Ohio
Date of death
Place of death