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Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor Emeritus in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. Ms. Morrison has degrees from Howard and Cornell Universities. She was appointed the Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton University spring 1989, a post she held until 2006. Among the universities where she has held teaching posts are Yale, Bard College and Rutgers. The New York State Board of Regents appointed her to the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at the State University of New York at Albany in 1984. In 1988 she was the Obert C. Tanner Lecturer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Professor at Syracuse University. In 1990 she delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Massey Lectures at Harvard University. In 1994 she held the International Cordorcet Chair at the Ecole Normale Superieure and College de France.
Her eight major novels, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise and Love have received extensive critical acclaim. She received the National Book Critics Award in 1978 for Song of Solomon and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Beloved. Both novels were chosen as the main selections for the Book of the Month Club in 1977 and 1987 respectively. In 2006 Beloved was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as the best work of American fiction published in the last quarter-century. Ms. Morrison co-authored the children’s books Remember, the Who’s Got Game? series, The Book of Mean People and The Big Box. Her books of essays include Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination; the edited collection Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality; and the co-edited collection Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case. Ms. Morrison’s lyrics “Honey and Rue,” commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Kathleen Battle, with music by Andre Previn, premiered January 1992; “Four Songs” with music by Mr. Previn, premiered by Sylvia McNair at Carnegie Hall, November 1994; “Sweet Talk” written for Jessye Norman with music by Richard Danielpour, premiered April 1997; and “Woman.Life.Song” commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Jessye Norman with music by Judith Weir, premiered April 2000; the opera “Margaret Garner” with music by Richard Danielpour, premiered in May 2005. In addition to Beloved and Song of Solomon, Morrision wrote 7 other novels including; A Mercy (2008), Love (2003), Jazz (1992), Tar Baby (1981), Paradise (1998), The Bluest Eye (1970), and Sula (1974) All of Morrison's fiction, from her first novel, The Bluest Eye, to 1998's Paradise, explores both the need for and the impossibility of real community and the bonds that both unite and divide African-American women. Morrison has also published a volume of critical work entitled Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination and has authored Dreaming Emmett, a play produced in 1986.
Hardcover: 160 pages A powerful tragedy distilled into a small masterpiece by the Nobel
Prize—winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to
that story, set two centuries earlier.
by Carolyn C. Denard (Editor)
Hardcover: 199 pages This Nobel Laureate's reflections on life, writing and other writers What Moves at the Margin collects three decades of Toni Morrison's writings about her work, her life, literature, and American society. The works included in this volume range from 1971, when Morrison (b. 1931) was a new editor at Random House and a beginning novelist, to 2002 when she was a professor at Princeton University and Nobel Laureate. Even in the early days of her career, in between editing other writers, writing her own novels, and raising two children, she found time to speak out on subjects that mattered to her. From the reviews and essays written for major publications to her moving tributes to other writers to the commanding acceptance speeches for major literary awards, Morrison has consistently engaged as a writer outside the margins of her fiction. These works provide a unique glimpse into Morrison's viewpoint as an observer of the world, the arts, and the changing landscape of American culture. The first section of the book, "Family and History," includes Morrison's writings about her family, Black women, Black history, and her own works. The second section, "Writers and Writing," offers her assessments of writers she admires and books she reviewed, edited at Random House, or gave a special affirmation to with a foreword or an introduction. The final section, "Politics and Society," includes essays and speeches where Morrison addresses issues in American society and the role of language and literature in the national culture. Among other pieces, this collection includes a reflection on 9/11, reviews of such seminal books by Black writers as Albert Murray's South to a Very Old Place and Gayl Jones's Corregidora, an essay on teaching moral values in the university, a eulogy for James Baldwin, and Morrison's Nobel lecture. Taken together, What Moves at the Margin documents the response to our time by one of American literature's most thoughtful and eloquent writers.
Toni Morrison: Conversations
by Carolyn C. Denard (Editor) Hardcover: 265 pages Thirty years of interviews with the author of The Bluest Eye, Song of
Solomon, Beloved, and other novels
Coretta Scott King Author Award Winner ISBN: 061839740X "On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated schools
unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. This pivotal decision
ushered in an emotional and trying period in our nation's history, the
effects of which still linger." Recalling this tumultuous time, Toni
Morrison has collected archival photographs that depict the events
surrounding school integration. These unforgettable images serve as the
inspiration for Professor Morrison's text - a fictional account of the
dialogue and emotions of the students who lived during the era of change in
separate-but-equal schooling. Remember offers a unique pictorial and
narrative journey that introduces children to a watershed period in American
history and its relevance today.
ISBN: 0375409440 From the internationally acclaimed Nobel laureate comes a richly conceived novel that illuminates the full spectrum of desire. May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida -- even L: all women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is both the void in, and the centre of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces -- a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial. This audacious vision of the nature of love -- its appetite, its sublime possession, its dread -- is rich in characters and striking scenes, and in its profound understanding of how alive the past can be. A major addition to the canon of one of the world’s literary masters.
ISBN: 0679445048 Song of Solomon begins with one of the most arresting scenes in our century''s literature: a dreamlike tableau depicting a man poised on a roof, about to fly into the air, while cloth rose petals swirl above the snow-covered ground and, in the astonished crowd below, one woman sings as another enters premature labor. The child born of that labor, Macon (Milkman) Dead, will eventually come to discover, through his complicated progress to maturity, the meaning of the drama that marked his birth. Toni Morrison''s novel is at once a romance of self-discovery, a retelling of the black experience in America that uncovers the inalienable poetry of that experience, and a family saga luminous in its depth, imaginative generosity, and universality. It is also a tribute to the ways in which, in the hands of a master, the ancient art of storytelling can be used to make the mysterious and invisible aspects of human life apparent, real, and firm to the touch. Read a Review of Song of Solomon From Sacred Fire
ISBN: 0679433740 Read Thumper's Thoughts on how to get through Paradise "They shoot the white girl first. With the others they can take their time." Toni Morrison's first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature opens with a horrifying scene of mob violence then chronicles its genesis in a small all-black town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by descendants of free slaves as intent on isolating themselves from the outside world as it once was on rejecting them, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage... Paradise is a tour de force of storytelling power, richly imagined and elegantly composed. Morrison challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth, into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and the way a society can turn on itself until it is forced to explode.
Hardcover: 324 pages At the center of Toni Morrison's fifth novel, which earned her the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is an almost unspeakable act of horror and heroism: a woman brutally kills her infant daughter rather than allow her to be enslaved. The woman is Sethe, and the novel traces her journey from slavery to freedom during and immediately following the Civil War. Woven into this circular, mesmerizing narrative are the horrible truths of Sethe's past: the incredible cruelties she endured as a slave, and the hardships she suffered in her journey north to freedom. Just as Sethe finds the past too painful to remember, and the future just "a matter of keeping the past at bay," her story is almost too painful to read. Yet Morrison manages to imbue the wreckage of her characters' lives with compassion, humanity, and humor. Part ghost story, part history lesson, part folk tale, Beloved finds beauty in the unbearable, and lets us all see the enduring promise of hope that lies in anyone's future. Coming from Plume in April 1999, Toni Morrison's #1 New York Times bestseller...Paradise
At its center--a
friendship between two women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injures.
Sula and Nel--both black, both smart, both poor, raised in a small Ohio town--meet when
they are twelve, wishbone thin and dreaming of princes.
Paperback: 320 pages Tar Baby,
audacious and hypnotic, is masterful in its mingling of tones--of longing and alarm, of
urbanity and a primal, mythic force in which the landscape itself becomes animate, alive
with a wild, dark complicity in the fates of the people whose drama unfolds. It is a novel
suffused with a tense and passionate inquiry, revealing a whole spectrum of emotions
underlying the relationships between black men and women, white men and women, and black
and white people.
Paperback: 256 pages Jazz, is
spellbinding for the haunting passion of its profound love story, and for the bittersweet
lyricism and refined sensuality of its powerful and elegant style.
Paperback: 224 pages The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove - a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others - who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Paperback: 112 pages Pulitzer
Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal
inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination.
Her goal, she states at the outset, is to "put forth an argument for extending the
study of American literature...draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use
that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close
exploration as did the original charting of the New World--without the mandate for
conquest." Author of Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and other vivid
portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a
historically racialized society has had on American writing in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to
forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her
compelling point is that the central characteristics of American
literature--individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an
obsession with figurations of death and hell--are responses to a dark and abiding
Africanist presence. Through her investigation of black characters, narrative strategies,
and idiom in the fiction of white American writers, Morrison provides a daring perspective
that is sure to alter conventional notions about American literature. She considers Willa
Cather and the impact of race on concept and plot; turns to Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville
to examine the black force that figures so significantly in the literature of early
America; and discusses the implications of the Africanist presence at the heart of
Huckleberry Finn. A final chapter on Ernest Hemingway is a brilliant exposition of the
racial subtext that glimmers beneath the surface plots of his fiction. Written with the
artistic vision that has earned her a preeminent place in modern letters.
Related Links Check out a great site! Anniina
Jokinen's Web Site on Ms. Morrison AALBC.com's Favorite Authors of the 20th Century Which is your favorite Toni Morrison Novel? Click here to find out what AALBC.com visitors think
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A Mercy
What
Moves at the Margin: Selected Essays, Reviews, and Speeches
Conversations
with Toni Morrison
Remember: The Journey to School Integration
Love
Song
of Solomon
Beloved
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