Toni Morrison, the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, has passed away at age 88, from complications related to pneumonia.
In its obituary, the New York Times wrote that her “best-selling work explored black identity in America and in particular the often crushing experience of black women through luminous, incantatory prose resembling that of no other writer in English … Ms. Morrison was the author of 11 novels as well as children’s books and essay collections. Among them were celebrated works like “Song of Solomon,” which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977, and “Beloved.”
In an appreciation, New Yorker writer Vinson Cunningham wrote, “I can think of no other writer whose work, and the cult of its consumption - still, surely, in its very first stages - embodies the ideal of writing and reading as a community practice, meant more for the enrichment of a people than for any individual’s private therapy or entertainment. ‘We don’t need any more writers as solitary heroes,’ she once said. ‘We need a heroic writer’s movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious.’ Her writing opens up into other writing, richness into richness, in a way that will help such solidarity come to pass.”
In its obituary, the New York Times wrote that her “best-selling work explored black identity in America and in particular the often crushing experience of black women through luminous, incantatory prose resembling that of no other writer in English … Ms. Morrison was the author of 11 novels as well as children’s books and essay collections. Among them were celebrated works like “Song of Solomon,” which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977, and “Beloved.”
In an appreciation, New Yorker writer Vinson Cunningham wrote, “I can think of no other writer whose work, and the cult of its consumption - still, surely, in its very first stages - embodies the ideal of writing and reading as a community practice, meant more for the enrichment of a people than for any individual’s private therapy or entertainment. ‘We don’t need any more writers as solitary heroes,’ she once said. ‘We need a heroic writer’s movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious.’ Her writing opens up into other writing, richness into richness, in a way that will help such solidarity come to pass.”
- KC's View:
