Happy Birthday, Toni Morrison
Born February 18, 1931, Lorain, OH | Died August 5, 2019, the Bronx, New York
Today, the Best American Essays newsletter essayist, editor, and literary critic Toni Morrison on the ninety-fourth anniversary of her birth.
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“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
“Anthologists do not ‘write’ their books, but they are responsible for them. No less than the authors they choose to reprint, they reveal the fabric of their ideas and the borders of their intelligence.”
First published essay: Review of To Be a Black Woman: Portraits in Fact and Fiction, edited by Mel Watkins and Jay David (William Morrow & Co., 1971), New York Times Sunday Book Review, March 28, 1971.
Selected nonfiction bibliography:
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1992)
What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn C. Denard, Jackson (University Press of Mississippi, 2008)
The Origin of Others (Harvard University Press, 2017)
The Source of Self-Regard: Essays, Speeches, Meditations (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019).
As editor:
Burn This Book, PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word (Harpers Studio, 2009)
James Baldwin: Early Novels and Stories (Library of America, 1998)
James Baldwin: Collected Essays (Library of America, 1998)
Included in or Listed in Notables in Best American Essays:
"Black Matter(s)," Grand Street, listed as Notable in The Best American Essays 1992
"How Can Values Be Taught in the University?" Michigan Quarterly Review, originally delivered at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values in 2000, listed as Notable in The Best American Essays 2002
See also:
Visit the Toni Morrison Society website, with citations to scholarship about Morrison’s work.
Watch The Pieces I Am (a documentary)
Listen to Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Lecture
Read Hilton Als, (guest editor of The Best American Essays 2018), "Ghosts in the House: How Toni Morrison Fostered a Generation of Black Writers,"The New Yorker, October 2003
Read Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah (contributor to The Best American Essays ), "The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison," The New York Times, April 2015