Synopsis
Toni Morrison (b.1931) 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 was born in Ohio, educated at Howard University and Cornell University, and is now a member of the faculty of Princeton University. Her most widely read novel is perhaps Beloved (1987), which won the Pulitzer Prize and was recently adapted for film. Song of Solomon (1977), however, is perhaps the most lyrical of her novels, following Milkman Dead as he struggles to understand his family history and the ways in which that history has both been damaged by and transcended the horror of slavery. All of Morrison's fiction, from her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), to last year's Paradise (1998), 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.
Ms. Magazine - Margo Jefferson
The ordinary spars with the extraordinary in Morrison's books. What would be a classically tragic sensibility, with its implacable move toward crisis and the extremes of pity and horror, is altered and illuminated by a thousand smaller, natural occurrences and circumstances.