Nobel laureate Toni Morrison dead at 88

bel laureate Toni Morrison, a pioneer and reigning giant of modern literature whose imaginative power in “Beloved,” ″Song of Solomon” and or works transformed American letters by dramatizing pursuit of freedom within boundaries of race, has died at 88.

Publisher Alfred A. Kpf anunced that Morrison died Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. Morrison’s family issued a statement through Kpf saying she died after a brief illness.

“Toni Morrison passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends,” family anunced. “She was an extremely devoted mor, grandmor, and aunt who reveled in being with her family and friends. consummate writer who treasured written word, wher her own, her students or ors, she re voraciously and was most at home when writing.”

Few authors rose in such rapid, spectacular style. She was nearly 40 when her first vel, “ Bluest Eye,” was published. By her early 60s, after just six vels, she h become first black woman to receive bel literature prize, praised in 1993 by Swedish acemy for her “visionary force” and for her delving into “langu itself, a langu she wants to liberate” from categories of black and white. In 2019, she was featured in an acclaimed documentary, “Toni Morrison: Pieces I Am.”

(Source: AP) 

Morrison helped raise American multiculturalism to world st and helped uncensor her country’s past, unearthing lives of unkwn and unwanted, those she would call “ unfree at heart of democratic experiment.” In her vels, history — black history — was a trove of poetry, trdy, love, venture and good old gossip, wher in small-town Ohio in “Sula” or big-city Harlem in “Jazz.” She regarded race as a social construct and through langu founded better world her characters suffered to attain. Morrison wove everything from African literature and slave folklore to Bible and Gabriel Garcia Marquez into most diverse, yet harmonious, of literary communities.

“Narrative has never been merely entertainment for me,” she said in her bel lecture. “It is, I believe, one of principal ways in which we absorb kwledge.”

Winner of 1988 Pulitzer Prize for “Beloved,” she was one of book world’s most regal presences, with her expanse of graying braids; her dark, discerning eyes; and warm, atrical voice, able to lower itself to a mysterious growl or rise to a humorous falsetto. “That handsome and perceptive ly,” James Baldwin called her.

Her mirers were countless — from fellow authors, college students and working people to Barack Obama, who awarded her a Presidential Medal of Freedom; to Oprah Winfrey, who idolized Morrison and helped greatly expand her reership. Morrison shared those high opinions, repeatedly labeling one of her vels, “Love,” as “perfect” and rejecting idea that artistic achievement called for quiet acceptance.

“Maya Angelou helped me without her kwing it,” Morrison told Associated Press during a 1998 interview. “When she was writing her first book, ‘I Kw Why Cd Bird Sings,’ I was an editor at Random House. She was having such a good time, and she never said, ‘Who me? My little book?’

“I decided that ... winning (bel) prize was fabulous,” Morrison ded. “body was going to take that and make it into something else. I felt representational. I felt American. I felt Ohioan. I felt blacker than ever. I felt more woman than ever. I felt all of that, and put all of that toger and went out and h a good time.”

second of four children of a welder and a domestic worker, Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, a steel town outside of Cleveland. She was encourd by her parents to re and to think, and was unimpressed by white kids in her community. Recalling how she felt like an “aristocrat,” Morrison believed she was smarter and took it for granted she was wiser. She was an hors student in high a school, and attended Howard University because she dreamed of life spent among black intellectuals.

At Howard, she spent much of her free time in ater (she h a laugh that could easily reach back row), later taught re and also met and married a Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison, whom she divorced in 1964. y h two children, Harold and Sle.

But although she went on to teach re, Howard disappointed her. Campus life seemed closer to a finishing school than to an institution of learning. Protesters, among m former Morrison student Stokely Carmichael, were demanding equality. Morrison wanted that, too, but wondered what kind.

“I thought y wanted to integrate for nefarious purposes,” she said. “I thought y should demand money in those black schools. That was problem — resources, better equipment, better teachers, buildings that were falling apart — t being in some high school next to some white kids.”

(Source: AP) 

In 1964, she answered an to work in textbook division of Random House. Over next 15 years, she would have an impact as a book editor, and as one of few black women in publishing, that alone would have ensured her legacy. She championed emerging fiction authors such as Gayl Jones and Toni Ce Bambara, helped introduce U.S. reers to such African writers as Wole Solinka, worked on a memoir by Muhamm Ali and topical books by such activists as Angela Davis and Black Panr Huey Newton. A special project was editing “ Black Book,” a collection of everything from newspaper vertisements to song lyrics that anticipated her immersion in everyday lives of past.

By late ’60s, she was a single mor and a determined writer who h been pushed by her future editor, Robert Gottlieb of Alfred A. Kpf, into deciding wher she’d write or edit. Seated at her kitchen table, she fleshed out a story based on a childhood memory of a black girl in Lorain — raped by her far — who desired blue eyes. She called vel “ Bluest Eye.”

Morrison prided herself on gift of applying “invisible ink,” making a point and leaving it to reer to discover it, such as her decision to withhold skin color of her characters in “Parise.” Her debut as an author came at height of Black Arts Movement and calls for literature as political and social protest. But Morrison criticized by indirection; she was political because of what she didn’t say. Racism and sexism were assumed; she wrote about ir effects, wher in “ Bluest Eye” or in “Sula,” a story of friendship and betrayal between two black women.

“ writers who affected me most were velists who were writing in Africa: Chinua Achebe, ‘Things Fall Apart,’ was a major education for me,” Morrison, who h studied William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf as a gruate student, told AP in 1998.

“y took ir black world for granted. black writer (in America) h done that except for Jean Toomer with ‘Cane.’ Everybody else h some confrontation with white people, which was t to say that Africans didn’t, but re was linguistically an assumption. langu was langu of center of world, which was m.

“So that me it possible for me to write ‘ Bluest Eye’ and t explain anything. That was wholly new! It was like a step into an absolutely brand new world. It was liberating in a way thing h been before!”

She h nt and was rejected by several publishers before reaching a deal with Holt, Rhinehart and Winston (w Henry Holt and Company), which released vel in 1970. Sales were modest, but her book me a deep impression on New York Times’ John Leonard, an early and ongoing champion of her writing, which he called “so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that vel becomes poetry.”

Setting her stories in segregated communities, where incest and suicide were more outrous n a sign which res “COLORED ONLY,” Morrison wrote of dreamers for whom price was often death, wher mor’s tragic choice to murder her baby girl — and save it from slavery — in “Beloved,” or black community that implodes in “Parise.”

Like Faulkner, her characters are burdened by legacy, and ongoing trdy, of slavery and separation. For Faulkner’s white Sourners, losers of Civil War, price is guilt, r and mness; for Morrison’s slaves and ir descendants, supposedly liberated, history follows like most unrelenting posse.

(Source: AP) 

“ future was sunset; past something to leave behind,” Morrison wrote in “Beloved,” in which ghost of slain daughter returns to haunt and obsess her mor.

“And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out. Slave life; freed life — every day was a test and a trial. thing could be counted on in a world where even when you were a solution you were a problem.”

Morrison’s breakthrough came in 1977 with “Song of Solomon,” her third vel and story of young Milkman De’s sexual, social and ancestral education. It was first work by a black writer since Richard Wright’s “Native Son” to be a full Book-of--Month selection and won National Book Critics Circle award. It was also Morrison’s first book to center on a male character, a vel which enabled her “get out of house, to de-domesticate landscape.”

But mainstream was ar kind of education. Reviewing “Song of Solomon,” author Reylds Price chided Morrison for “ understandable but weakening omission of active white characters.” (He later recanted). When “Beloved” was overlooked for a National Book Award, a letter of protest from 48 black writers, including Angelou and Amiri Baraka, was published in New York Times Book Review, ting that Morrison h never won a major literary prize.

“Beloved” went on to win Pulitzer and Morrison soon ascended to very top of literary world, winning bel and presiding as ufficial laureate of Winfrey’s book club, founded in 1996. Winfrey chose “Song of Solomon,” ″ Bluest Eye,” ″Parise” and “Sula” over years and would list all of Morrison’s works as among her favorites. Winfrey also starred in and helped produce 1998 film version of “Beloved.”

As with so many or laureates, Morrison’s post-bel fiction was viewed less favorably than her earlier work. Morrison received major competitive awards after bel and was criticized for awkward plotting and pretentious langu in “Love” and “Parise.” But a vel published in 2008, “A Mercy,” was highly praised. “Home,” a brief vel about a young Korean War veteran, came out in 2012 and was followed three later by a contemporary drama, “God Help Child.”

Morrison’s or works included “Playing in Dark,” a collection of essays; “Dreaming Emmet,” a play about slain teenr Emmett Till; and several children’s books co-authored with her son, Sle Morrison (who died of cancer in 2010). In vember 2016, she wrote a highly cited New York essay about election of Donald Trump, calling his ascension to presidency a mark of what whites would settle for to hold on to ir status.

“So scary are consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against defenseless as strength. se people are t so much angry as terrified, with kind of terror that makes knees tremble,” she wrote.

“William Faulkner understood this better than almost any or American writer. In ‘Absalom, Absalom,’ incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Sourn family than ackwledging one drop of black blood that would clearly soil family line. Rar than lose its “whiteness” (once again), family chooses murder.”

(Source: AP)

She taught for years at Princeton University, from which she retired in 2006, but also h an apartment in downtown Manhattan and a riverfront house in New York’s Rockland County that burned down in 1993, destroying manuscripts, first editions of Faulkner and or writers and numerous family mementoes. She h house rebuilt and continued to live and work re.

“When I’m t thinking about a vel, or t actually writing it, it’s t very good; 21st century is t a very nice place. I need it (writing) to just stay stey, emotionally,” she told AP in 2012.

“When I finished ‘ Bluest Eye,’ ... I was t pleased. I remember feeling s. And n I thought, ‘Oh, you kw, everybody’s talking about “sisterhood,‘” I wanted to write about what women friends are really like. ( inspiration for ‘Sula’). All of a sudden whole world was a real interesting place. Everything in it was something I could use or discard. It h shape. thing is — that’s how I live here.”