Photo: Timothy Fadek/Corbis via Getty Images
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.”
freddythepole19 on August 6th, 2019 at 15:23 UTC »
I met her once. I was seven years old and she was giving a talk at my local library. My mother's way of not paying for a babysitter was to have me just walk to the library after school and read until she came and picked me up later that evening, so I practically lived there. I was lying on the floor between two stacks of books, reading some book I've since forgotten, and she almost tripped over me as she was passing through. She asked me what I was reading, and then she asked me why I liked reading. I told her that it's like traveling to different worlds and it makes me feel like I had superpowers. She laughed, and told me I was going to be a writer, and then she moved on past. I didn't even know it was her until almost a decade later. I didn't read any of her books until a few years after that. She was such a profoundly kind and insightful woman. The world is a colder place for the lack of her in it.
InstantIdealism on August 6th, 2019 at 14:11 UTC »
Terribly sad news. Her Nobel Prize acceptance speech was pretty incredible -
"The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here,” his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the “final word,” the precise “summing up,” acknowledging their “poor power to add or detract,” his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns. It is the deference that moves her, that recognition that language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never “pin down” slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable."
(Source:) https://nothingintherulebook.com/2018/04/23/the-power-of-language-toni-morrisons-nobel-prize-acceptance-speech/
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.