Toni Morrison dead at 88
Toni Morrison, Nobel and Pulitzer prize winning author died Monday night, August 5th, at a New York hospital.
She was most commonly known for her Pulitzer prizewinning novel “Beloved”, which was adapted for film in 1998.
She was also the first black woman to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, and was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 by President Barack Obama.
Selling her first book “The Bluest Eye” in 1970 at age 40, Morrison centered black women in fiction at a time American publishing where the inner and outer lives of black women were not a common subject in commercial fiction. She transformed American fiction with the depth of her characters and the beauty of her prose, breathing life and impact to the realities of existence in America.
Before Morrison first published in 1970, as an editor for Random House she saw to it that more black stories and black voices saw publication, including biographies of boxer Muhammad Ali, and activist Angela Davis.
She was a prolific essayist and letter writer, and her wit and deft turn of phrase can be seen in the collection of essays published by Penguin/Random House titled “The Source of Self Regard” published February 12th, 2019.
Her voice will be profoundly missed.
JL Jamieson is a strange book nerd who writes technical documents by day, and book news, reviews, and other assorted opinions for you by night. She is working on her own fiction, and spends time making jewelry to sell at local conventions, as well as stalking the social media accounts of all your favorite writers.