Toni Morrison Dead at 88

Authored by vulture.com and submitted by shabuluba
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The celebrated novelist Toni Morrison died Monday night, according to her publisher, Knopf. She was 88 years old. According to Knopf, the author died peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, following a “short illness.” Born Chloe Ardella Wofford, Morrison was best known for her critically acclaimed and best-selling novel Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among her other memorable and influential novels were Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1997); the three books make up a loose trilogy. Just after the last of them was published, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first black woman of any nationality to do so. The Nobel Committee celebrated her as an author “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” By then, she had already written six novels; she would go on to write five more. Her latest, God Help the Child, was published in 2015. She wrote through the toughest of times, including the death of her son in 2010. “I stopped writing until I began to think, he would be really put out if he thought that he had caused me to stop,” Morrison told Interview magazine around the release of her ninth novel, Home, in 2012.

Before she was a world-renowned author, Morrison broke barriers as an editor for Random House, where she worked for 19 years, publishing a new generation of black writers, including Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and Angela Davis. She was also the chair of humanities at Princeton, where she taught from 1989 to 2006.

“We die,” Morrison closed her Nobel Prize address. “That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

Villeneuve_ on August 6th, 2019 at 13:57 UTC »

I read the headline and immediately teared up. This breaks my heart. Rest in peace, Morrison, and thank you for composing some of the most beautiful and evocative prose I have had the pleasure of reading till date.

This passage about love and self-worth from Song of Solomon continues to be one of my all-time favourite quotes/passages:

You think because he doesn’t love you that you are worthless. You think because he doesn’t want you anymore that he is right – that his judgment and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Don't. It’s a bad word, ‘belong’. Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn’t be like that. Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can’t even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? You go up top and what do you see? His head. The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, because the clouds let him; they don’t wrap him up. They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him. [...] You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don’t, do you? And neither does he. You’re turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can’t value you more than you value yourself.

That analogy with the clouds and the mountain is so clever and eloquent, and there's just something really beautiful about the way this passage is written in general. I got goosebumps when I first read it.

Assholepants on August 6th, 2019 at 13:41 UTC »

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

—Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture

What an incredible writer. I am so sad to hear this. I took an entire seminar on Toni Morrison in college—i believe we read 11 of her books. She truly opened up the world for me, as a writer, a woman, an American. My professor said that she and her colleagues all remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they read the ending of Song of Solomon, and I do too. Toni Morrison was just simply great. Rest In Peace.

wastedglitter_ on August 6th, 2019 at 13:38 UTC »

Oh my goodness. This is heartbreaking.

Reading ‘Beloved’ genuinely changed the way I look at life! I absolutely LOVE that book. Highly recommend it.

RIP to this beautiful, talented woman. & thank you for the treasures you left us with.