TONI MORRISON
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (1931-2019) was born and raised in Lorain, Ohio. She went to Howard University in Washington DC for an undergraduate degree, then Cornell University for her M.A. Almost a decade passed (marriage, children, divorce) before she became the first female black editor at Random House in 1967. In 1970 she published The Bluest Eye, a signal debut, and by 1975 her writing career moved her out of editing and into a rise to one of the premier novelists in the United States. In 1987 she published Beloved, her epic ghost story in a sense, which earned her financial security, a nationwide bestseller for half a year. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 for her lifetime of work to date. She was the first black woman of any nation to win the prize. The eminence of being recognized as a world writer did not stop or slow down her writing or teaching (fellowships, lectureships, as befit her position). She died August 5, 2019, at 88 years.
The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
Here is Toni Morrison in her own words: a rich gathering of her most important essays and speeches, spanning four decades.
These pages give us her searing prayer for the dead of 9/11, her Nobel lecture on the power of language, her searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., her heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. She looks deeply into the fault lines of culture and freedom: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, “black matter(s),” human rights, the artist in society, the Afro-American presence in American literature. And she turns her incisive critical eye to her own work (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, Paradise) and that of others.
An essential collection from an essential writer, The Source of Self-Regard shines with the literary elegance, intellectual prowess, spiritual depth, and moral compass that have made Toni Morrison our most cherished and enduring voice.
“Profoundly insightful. . . . Speaks to today’s social and political moment as directly as this morning’s headlines.” —NPR