Toni Morrison – Author of “Beloved” dies at 88.

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Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019) was an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher and professor emeritus at Princeton University, New Jersey, USA. She got graduated in 1953 with a B.A. in English and earn a Master of Arts from Cornell University in 1955. She taught English, first at Texas Southern University in Houston for two years, then at Howard for seven years. From 1956, she began working as an editor for L. W. Singer, a textbook division of publisher Random House, 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. 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). 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.

In 1983, Morrison left publishing to devote more time to writing, and lived in a converted boathouse on the Hudson River in Nyack, New York. She taught English at two branches of the State University of New York and at Rutgers University: New Brunswick Campus. In 1984, she was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University at Albany, The State University of New York.  In 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was the first black woman of any nationality to win the prize. Although her novels typically concentrate on black women, Morrison did not identify her works as feminist.

 Awards:

1975: Ohioana Book Award for Sula

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

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

1988: Ohioana Career Medal for contributions to education, literature, and the humanities

1989: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Harvard University

1993: Nobel Prize for Literature

1993: Commander of the Arts and Letters, Paris

1994: Condorcet Medal, Paris

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

2005: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Oxford University

2008: New Jersey Hall of Fame inductee

2009: Norman Mailer Prize, Lifetime Achievement

2010: Officier de la Légion d’Honneur

2011: Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction

2011: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Rutgers University Graduation Commencement

2011: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Geneva

2012: Presidential Medal of Freedom

2013: The Nichols-Chancellor’s Medal awarded by Vanderbilt University

2014 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award given by the National Book Critics Circle

2016 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction

2016 The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry (The Norton Lectures), Harvard University

2016 The Edward MacDowell Medal, awarded by The MacDowell Colony

2018 The Thomas Jefferson Medal, awarded by The American Philosophical Society

Nominations :

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?

Novels :

The Bluest Eye. 1970.

Sula. 1973.

Song of Solomon. 1977.

Tar Baby. 1981.

Beloved. 1987.

Jazz. 1992.

Paradise. 1997.

Love. 2003.

A Mercy. 2008.

Home. 2012.

God Help the Child. 2015.

Children’s literature (with Slade Morrison)

The Big Box (1999).

The Book of Mean People (2002).

Who’s Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper?, The Lion or the Mouse?, Poppy or the Snake?  (2007).

Peeny Butter Fudge (2009).

Please, Louise (2014).

Short fiction :

“Recitatif” (1983)

“Sweetness” (2015)

Plays :

Dreaming Emmett (performed 1986)

Desdemona (first performed May 15, 2011, in Vienna)

 Libretto :

Margaret Garner (first performed May 2005)

Non-fiction:

Morrison, Toni (2009). “Foreword”. In Harris, Middleton A.; Levitt, Morris; Furman, Roger; Smith, Ernest (eds.). The Black Book. Random House.

Editor (July 24, 2007). Playing in the Dark. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Editor and foreword (1992). Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill,   Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. Pantheon Books.

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: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word, editor (2009).

The Origin of Others (2017). Harvard University Press.

The Source of Self-Regard: Essays, Speeches, Meditations (2019). Random House.

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.