Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison, born Chloe Anthony Wofford, became one of the most consequential American novelists and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. She did not plan to be a writer. By her own account she began The Bluest Eye, set in Lorain, Ohio in 1941 around a young Black girl named Pecola who is taught to see herself as ugly, while she was a single mother in Syracuse, New York, working as a textbook editor for Random House. She was lonely and unhappy and had no one to hold real conversations with, so she wrote. Writing soon became a compulsive way of knowing and thinking, and, in her words, a way to order her experience. She spoke of Black people's grace as lying in what they do with language, and that conviction shaped her prose, her editing, and her teaching.

Her novels moved from the intimate to the historical without losing either. Sula follows a friendship between two Black women who grow up poor in a hilltop neighborhood called the Bottom. Song of Solomon, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977, sends Milkman Dead from a rustbelt city toward the origins of his family. Tar Baby set a love affair between two Black Americans against a wealthy white family's Caribbean estate and the domestic servants who sustain it. Beloved (1987) was inspired by Margaret Garner, who fled slavery in Kentucky for Ohio in 1856, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. Morrison said that in Beloved she wanted to understand what contributed most to an enslaved woman's self-regard, and she concluded, with her research behind her intuition, that it was her identity as a mother, her ability to remain what the institution said she was not. Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1997) completed what she described as a trilogy on African-American history. Later came Love, A Mercy, Home, and God Help the Child. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, and she was the last American novelist to win it for decades and the last American to deliver the lecture in person.

Morrison was also a critic, editor, and public voice who treated the American story about race as a question about the people telling it. In Playing in the Dark (1992) she read major white American writers to show how their perceptions of blackness gave defining shape to their work and to the canon. She edited Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power (1992), gathering eighteen essays on the Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas hearings, and Birth of a Nation'hood (1997) with Claudia Brodsky Lacour, on the O.J. Simpson case, where she described an age of spectacle in which information is exploited as entertainment. She also edited Burn This Book (2009) for PEN on censorship and the necessity of writers. In the first two anthologies she did not argue alone. She convened Black and white, male and female scholars, lawyers, and critics so that legal, historical, psychological, and linguistic readings could meet around a single national event. Her essays and speeches, collected in What Moves at the Margin, The Origin of Others, and The Source of Self-Regard, run from her years as an editor in 1971 into the early 2000s and later, and include a 1981 address on solidarity and the labor of writing.

Her public stance combined refusal and responsibility. In a 1993 interview she turned the question of racism back on white Americans, asking what a person is without racism and insisting that she was not a victim. In a 1998 interview she rejected a question that treated white characters as the measure of a serious writer. On 60 Minutes that year she said she wanted her activities to stand for something because of a debt to her family and community. She spoke about gender with the same candor. In her 1989 lecture "Women, Race and Memory" she noted that women's liberation flowered best in soil prepared by Black liberation, and also named women's own conscious and unconscious complicity with sexism. She asked how a woman can be respected as a human being without becoming a male-like or male-dominated citizen. She delivered the eulogy at James Baldwin's funeral on December 8, 1987, and at Wellesley in 2004, during the Iraq War, she gave a commencement address that questioned easy wisdom passed between generations and urged graduates to imagine being human without domination over others. She treated narrative as radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. She died in August 2019 at the age of 88.