Toni Morrison born 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, is perhaps the most celebrated contemporary American novelist. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, Morrison powerfully evokes in her fiction the legacies of displacement and slavery that have been bequeathed to the African-American community.
Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor Emeritus in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.
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.
Toni Morrison - Mini Bio (© 2012 A+E Television Networks, LLC. All Rights Reserved)
Home
Click to order via
Amazon
Hardcover: 160 pages
Publisher: Knopf (May 8, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307594165
ISBN-13: 978-0307594167
Read an Review Written by Cynique
America's most celebrated novelist, Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison extends her profound take on our history with this twentieth-century tale of redemption: a taut and tortured story about one man’s desperate search for himself in a world disfigured by war.
Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he's hated all his life. As Frank revisits his memories from childhood and the war that have left him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he had thought he could never possess again.Selected as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012 by the New York Times
A Mercy
Click to order via
Amazon
Hardcover: 160 pages
Publisher: Knopf Canada (November 11, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0676978304
ISBN-13: 978-0676978308
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.
Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader in 1680s United States, when the slave
trade is still in its infancy. Reluctantly he takes a small slave girl
in part payment from a plantation owner for a bad debt. Feeling rejected
by her slave mother, 14-year-old Florens can read and write and might be
useful on his farm. Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older
servant woman at her new master's house, but later from the handsome
blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their
lives . . .
At the novel's heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent,
disturbing story of a mother and a daughter a mother who casts off her
daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise
that abandonment.
Toni Morrison: Conversations
Click to order via
Amazon
by Carolyn C. Denard (Editor)
Hardcover: 265 pages
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi (June 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1604730188
ISBN-13: 978-1604730180
Thirty years of interviews with the author of The Bluest Eye, Song of
Solomon, Beloved, and other novels
As a chronicler of the African American experience in fiction and as an
incisive cultural commentator in her essays and lectures, Toni Morrison
(b. 1931) is regarded as one of the nation's most distinguished
novelists and intellectuals. Her novels are richly layered narratives
that explore the meanings of tragedy and myth in individual lives.
Morrison's perspectives on American life and culture, rendered with a
deep understanding of the consequences of history and the power of art,
are always compelling.
Toni Morrison: Conversations includes interviews with the Nobel Laureate
that bring into the foreground Morrison's comments on American
literature and society, the academy, and her own work. She discusses
growing up in Lorain, Ohio, her role as editor at Random House, the
continuing evolution of her style, her teaching philosophy, and her most
recent novels Jazz, Paradise, and Love. This volume includes interviews
and profiles from the 1970s and 1980s that were not collected in
Conversations with Toni Morrison (1993) and a rich collection of new
interviews published together for the first time, including
conversations with Paula Giddings, Salman Rushdie, Charlie Rose, and
Elissa Schappell.
Carolyn C. Denard is the author of scholarly essays on Toni Morrison and
the forthcoming Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison. She is
Associate Dean of the College at Brown University and founder of the
Toni Morrison Society.
What
Moves at the Margin: Selected Essays, Reviews, and Speeches
Click to order via Amazon
by Carolyn C. Denard (Editor)
Hardcover: 199 pages
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi (April 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 160473017X
ISBN-13: 978-1604730173
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.
Remember: The Journey to School Integration
Click to order via Amazon
Coretta Scott King Author Award Winner
ISBN: 061839740X
Format: Hardcover, 78pp
Pub. Date: May 2004
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
Age Range: 9 to 12
"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.
Love
Click to order via Amazon
ISBN: 0375409440
Format: Hardcover, 208pp
Pub. Date: October 28, 2003
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
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.
This is coast country, humid and God fearing, where female recklessness
runs too deep for short shorts or thongs or cameras. But then or now, decent
underwear or none, wild women never could hide their innocence -- a kind of
pitty-kitty hopefulness that their prince was on his way. Especially the
tough ones with their box cutters and dirty language, or the glossy ones
with two-seated cars and a pocketbook full of dope. Even the ones who wear
scars like Presidential medals and stockings rolled at their ankles can't
hide the sugar-child, the winsome baby girl curled up somewhere inside,
between the ribs, say, or under the heart.
'from Love, the Hardcover edition.
Song
of Solomon
ISBN: 0679445048
Format: Hardcover, 362pp
Pub. Date: October 1995
Publisher: Knopf Alfred A
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
Paradise
Click to order via Amazon
Hardcover: 318 pages
Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (December 24, 1997)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679433740
ISBN-13: 978-0679433743
Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 1.4 inches
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
Publisher: Knopf (September 29, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375405623
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
Sula
Click to order via Amazon
Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Plume; Oprah edition (April 5, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0452283868
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.
Through their girlhood years they share everything--perceptions, judgments, yearnings,
secrets, even crime--until Sula gets out, out of the Bottom, the hilltop neighborhood
where beneath the sporting life of the men hanging around the place in headrags and soft
felt hats there hides a fierce resentment at failed crops, lost jobs, thieving insurance
men, bug-ridden flour...at the invisible line that cannot be overstepped.
Sula leaps it and roams the cities of America for ten years. Then she returns to the town,
to her friend. But Nel is a wife now, settled with her man and her three children. She
belongs. She accommodates to the Bottom, where you avoid the hand of God by getting in it,
by staying upright, helping out at church suppers, asking after folks--where you
deal with evil by surviving it.
Not Sula. As willing to feel pain as to give pain, she can never accommodate. Nel can''t
understand her any more, and the others never did. Sula scares them. Mention her now, and
they recall that she put her grandma in an old folks'' home (the old lady who let a train
take her leg for the insurance)...that a child drowned in the river years ago...that there
was a plague of robins when she first returned...
In clear, dark, resonant language, Toni Morrison brilliantly evokes not only a bond
between two lives, but the harsh, loveless, ultimately mad world in which that bond is
destroyed, the world of the Bottom and its people, through forty years, up to the time of
their bewildered realization that even more than they feared Sula, their pariah, they
needed her.
Tar
BabyPaperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (June 8, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1400033446
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.
The place is a Caribbean island. In their mansion overlooking the sea, the cultivated
millionaire Valerian Street, now retired, and his pretty, younger wife, Margaret, go
through rituals of living, as if in a trance. It is the black servant couple, who have
been with the Streets for years--the fastidious butler, Sydney, and his strong yet remote
wife--who have arranged every detail of existence to create a surface calm broken only by
sudden bursts of verbal sparring between Valerian and his wife. And there is a visitor
among them--a beautiful young black woman, Jadine, who is not only the servant''s dazzling
niece, but the proteg'e and friend of the Streets themselves; Jadine, who has been
educated at the Sorbonne at Valerian''s expense and is home now for a respite from her
Paris world of fashion, film and art.
Through a season of untroubled ease, the lives of these five move with a ritualized grace
until, one night, a ragged, starving black American street man breaks into the house. And,
in a single moment, with Valerian''s perverse decision not to call for help but instead to
invite the man to sit with them and eat, everything changes. Valerian moves toward a
larger abdication. Margaret''s delicate and enduring deception is shattered. The butler
and his wife are forced into acknowledging their illusions. And Jadine, who at first is
repelled by the intruder, finds herself moving inexorably toward him--he calls himself
Son; he is a kind of black man she has dreaded since childhood; uneducated, violent,
contemptuous of her privilege.
As Jadine and Son come together in the loving collision they have both welcomed and
feared, the novel moves outward--to the Florida backwater town Son was raised in, fled
from, yet cherishes; to her sleek New York; then back to the island people and
their protective and entangling legends. As the lovers strive to hold and understand each
other, as they experience the awful weight of the separate worlds that have formed
them--she perceiving his vision of reality and of love as inimical to her freedom, he
perceiving her as the classic lure, the tar baby set out to entrap him--all the mysterious
elements, all the highly charged threads of the story converge. Everything that is at risk
is made clear: how the conflicts and dramas wrought by social and cultural circumstances
must ultimately be played out in the realm of the heart.
Once again, Toni Morrison has given us a novel of daring, fascination, and power.
Jazz
Click to order via Amazon
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (June 8, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1400076218
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.
It is winter, barely three days into 1926, seven years after Armistice; we are in the
scintillating City, around Lenox Avenue, "when all the wars are over and there will
never be another one...At last, at last, everything''s ahead...Here comes the new. Look
out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff."
But amid the euphoric decisiveness, a tragedy ensues among people who had train-danced
into the City, from points south and west, in search of promise.
Joe Trace--in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, erstwhile
devoted husband--shoots to death his lover of three months, impetuous, eighteen-year-old
Dorcas ("Everything was like a picture show to her"). At the funeral, his
determined, hard-working wife, Violet, herself a hairdresser--who is given to stumbling
into dark mental cracks, and who talks mostly to birds--tries with a knife to disfigure
the corpse.
In a dazzling act of jazz-like improvisation, moving seamlessly in and out of past,
present, and future, a mysterious voice--whose identity is a matter of each reader''s
imagination--weaves this brilliant fiction, at the same time showing how its blues
are informed by the brutal exigencies of slavery. Richly combining history, legend,
reminiscence, this voice captures as never before the ineffable mood, the complex
humanity, of black urban life at a moment in our century we assumed we understood.
Jazz is an unprecedented and astonishing invention, a landmark on the American
literary landscape--a novel unforgettable and for all time.
The
Bluest Eye
Click to order via Amazon
Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Plume; Reissue edition (September 6, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0452287065
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.
Playing
in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
Click to order via Amazon
Paperback: 112 pages
Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (July 27, 1993)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679745424
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.
Conversations
with Toni Morrison
Click to order via
Amazon
by Danille Taylor-Guthrie (Editor)
Paperback: 312 pages
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi (April 1, 1994)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0878056920
ISBN-13: 978-0878056927
This is a collection of interviews, beginning in 1974, with Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Morrison describes herself as an African-American writer, and these essays show her to be an artist whose creativity is intimately linked with her African-American experience.
Related Links
AALBC.com's Favorite Authors of the 20th Century
Ms. Morrison was selected as the (#1 out of 50 selected) favorite author of the 20th
Century
Which is your favorite Toni Morrison Novel?
Click here to find out what AALBC.com
visitors think
Beloved