3 minute read
Literary Lives 12
from 06252021 WEEKEND
by tribune242
fiftieth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954 that declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional.
From 1997 to 2003 Morrison was an Andrew D White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. Two years later, in June 2005, Oxford University awarded Morrison an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree.
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Early in 2006, a selection of prominent writers, literary critics, and editors chose Beloved (1987) by Morrison as the best work of fiction published in the previous 25 years – as announced in The New York Times Book Review.
“In Search of the Best: Any other outcome would have been startling, since Morrison’s novel has inserted itself into the American canon more completely than any of its potential rivals. With remarkable speed, ‘Beloved’ has, less than twenty years after its publication, become a staple of the college literary curriculum, which is to say a classic. The triumph is commensurate with its ambition, since it was Morrison’s ambition in writing it to expand the range of classic American literature, to enter, as a living black woman, the company of dead white males like Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne and Twain.”
– AD Scott Book Critic The New York Times
In November 2006, Morrison was invited by the Louvre Museum in Paris as the second in its “Grand Invité” programme to guest-curate a month-long series of events across the arts, on the theme of “The Foreigner’s Home” about which the New York Times stated:
“In tapping her own African-American culture, Ms. Morrison is eager to credit ‘foreigners’ with enriching the countries where they settle.”
A Mercy, Morrison’s ninth novel, was published in 2008 and is set in the Virginia colonies of 1682.
“‘A Mercy’ is a poetic, visionary, mesmerising tale that captures, in the cradle of our present problems and strains, the natal curse put on us back then by the Indian tribes, Africans, Dutch, Portuguese, and English competing to get their footing in the New World against a hostile landscape and the essentially tragic nature of human experience.”
– Diane Johnson Vanity Fair
From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held the Robert F Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University. However she did not regularly offer writing workshops to students after the late 1990s, earning some criticism. Instead, she conceived the Princeton Atelier programme which brought together students with writers and performing artists, encouraging them to produce works of art that were presented to the public after a semester of collaboration.
On November 17, 2017, Princeton University dedicated Morrison Hall (a building previously called West College) in her honour.
After she retired, Morrison wrote books for children with her younger son Slade Morrison – a painter and musician. Slade Morrison died of pancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, aged 45. Her novel Home (2012) – dedicated to her son – was half finished when he died.
Morrison received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Rutgers University in New Brunswick in May 2011, and that same year worked with opera director Peter Sellars and Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traomé in a new production of Desdemona – creating a new perspective on the relationship of Othello’s wife Desdemona and her African nursemaid Barbary. The play, a mixture or words, music and song, premiered in Vienna in 2011.
In August 2012, Oberlin College in Ohio became the home base of the Toni Morrison Society, dedicated to scholarly research of Morrison’s work.
Morrison’s 11th and last novel, God Help the Child, was published in 2015. The book recounts the story of an executive named “Bride” in the fashion and beauty industry whose mother tormented her as a child for being dark-skinned – a childhood trauma that dogged her throughout her entire life.
On May 29, 2012, President Barack Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Toni Morrison died at Montefiore Medical Centre in The Bronx, New York City, on August 5, 2019, from complications of pneumonia. She was 88 years old. A memorial was held for her on November 21, 2019 at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in the Morningside Heights neighbourhood of Manhattan in New York City. She was eulogised at this special service by Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, Michael Ondaatje, David Pemnick, Fran Lebowitz, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Edwidge Danticat, and the jazz saxophonist David Murray.
Morrison left an estate of $20 million dollars.
TONI Morrison with Oprah Winfrey
