American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, and professor emeritus at Princeton University Chloe Anthony Wofford, known to the world as “Toni” Morrison, died on August 5, 2019 from complications of pneumonia at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, New York City. She was 88 years old.
“Why was Toni Morrison so important? When she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, it was because she “in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality. In each of her works Morrison manages to find a new way to think about and look upon blackness as it stands in American life.”
Source Unknown | Dec 15, 2016
Source Unknown | Dec 15, 2016
The Bluest Eye, her first novel, was published in 1970. She gained national attention in 1977 with the publishing of Song of Solomon for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Ms. Morrison subsequently received Countless awards most notably the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, Presidential Medal of Freedom from former President Barack Obama in 2012, and Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1987 for Beloved which was produced as a movie in 1998. In 1996, she received the National Endowment for the Humanities and selected for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government’s highest honor for achievement in humanities. In 2002 her name was added to the list of 100 Greatest African Americans.
“In [Morrison’s] works, she strips away the idols of whiteness and of Blackness that have prevented Blacks in the United States from knowing themselves and gives them their own true, mythical, remembered words to live by. She takes on the whole culture and seeks to restore the mythos and the ethos that will clarify the meaning of the journey of African-Americans in the United States. She is healer and prophet; she is nurturer and guide; and because she achieves these tasks with such grace, such love, and such confidence, courage, and skill, Morrison holds an indelible position of prominence in African-American history and the history of great writers throughout the world.”
Black Women In America: A Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. 2 M-Z Carolyn Denard
Ms. Morrison was born on February 18, 1931, Ohio. She leaves two children —Slade Morrison, Harold Ford Morrison. Upon her death, Morrison had a net worth of 20 million dollars.
“In [Morrison’s] works, she strips away the idols of whiteness and of Blackness that have prevented Blacks in the United States from knowing themselves and gives them their own true, mythical, remembered words to live by. She takes on the whole culture and seeks to restore the mythos and the ethos that will clarify the meaning of the journey of African-Americans in the United States. She is healer and prophet; she is nurturer and guide; and because she achieves these tasks with such grace, such love, and such confidence, courage, and skill, Morrison holds an indelible position of prominence in African-American history and the history of great writers throughout the world.”
Black Women In America: A Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. 2 M-Z Carolyn Denard
Ms. Morrison was born on February 18, 1931, Ohio. She leaves two children —Slade Morrison, Harold Ford Morrison. Upon her death, Morrison had a net worth of 20 million dollars.