| 1 | Name: | Professor Chloe Anthony (Toni) Morrison | |
| Institution: | Princeton University | ||
| Year Elected: | 1994 | ||
| Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | ||
| Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1931 | ||
| Death Date: | August 5, 2019 | ||
Chloe A. "Toni" Morrison was a novelist who also served for over 17 years as Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. Her writing, for which she was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, is known for its great emotional range, epic themes, subtlety, vivid dialogue and verbal power. After earning degrees from Howard University (B.A., 1953) and Cornell University (M.A., 1955), Ms. Morrison taught English at Howard and Texas Southern Universities and the State University of New York and worked as a textbook editor, during which time she played an instrumental role in bringing African-American literature into the mainstream. In 1970 she published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, which she had written while teaching at Howard and raising two children. Sula, a novel about two black women friends, followed in 1973, and in 1977 Ms. Morrison published the family chronicle Song of Solomon, which won the National Critics Award and brought her to national attention. Subsequent books included 1981's Tar Baby, in which she expanded her exploration of issues of class, sexuality, racial identity and family dynamics, and 1987's Beloved, for which she was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Loosely based on the life and legal case of escaped slave Margaret Garner, Beloved was cited by The New York Times in 2006 as the best work of fiction of the past 25 years. Ms. Morrison's most recent works include Jazz (1992), Paradise (1999), Love (2003), A Mercy (2008), Little Cloud and Lady Wind (2010), Home (2012), God Help the Children (2015) and she has also published a series of children's books with her son Slade Morrison. Fellow APS member Cornel West has said that her writing "has a lyricism that reminds you of Tennessee Williams, a sense of drama that reminds you of Schiller, and a rhythm that reminds you of Sara Vaughan." A truly gifted writer whose lyrical prose delighted both literary critics and the general public, Toni Morrison opened the eyes of all readers to the incredible richness, variety and humor of African-American life. Her awards include the 2009 Norman Mailer Writers Colony Award, the 2012 Medal of Freedom presented by President Obama, the National Book Critics Circle Arad Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2016 Edward MacDowell Medal, the 2016 Saul Bellow Award from the PEN American Center, the 2017 Emerson-Thoreau Medal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the 2019 American Academy of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal for Fiction. She was awarded the American Philosophical Society's Thomas Jefferson Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences in 2018. The award was presented "in recognition of a distinguished lifetime of extraordinary contributions to American letters." Toni Morrison was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1994. She died August 5, 2019 in New York, New York at the age of 88. | |||