Nobel laureate in literature and Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and essayist Toni Morrison died August 5 at Montefiore Medical Center in New York after a short illness. She was 88 years old.
Ms. Morrison, who was born February 18, 1931 Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, was an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher and professor emeritus at Princeton University. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, she won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for Beloved (1987).
Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government’s highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Also that year, she was honored with the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Morrison wrote the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, first performed in 2005. On May 29, 2012, President Barack Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.
Here is Ms, Morrison’s Nobel lecture from 1993.
May the Goddess guide her to the Summerlands. May her family, and friends and the world find peace. Blessed Be.