Morrison lives in Princeton, New Jersey and upstate New York. In 1997, she wrote the lyrics for 'Sweet Talk', which was written by Richard Danielpour and performed in concert by Jessye Norman. The lyrics were sung in performance by Kathleen Battle. Toni Morrison was commissioned by Carnegie Hall in 1992 to write lyrics 'Honey and Me', an original piece of music by Andre Previn. Among them are Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Sarah Lawrence College, Dartmouth, Yale, Georgetown, Columbia University and Brown University. Morrison was also a senior editor at Random House for 20 years.Ī host of colleges and universities have given honorary degrees to Morrison. In 1990 she delivered the Clark lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Massey Lectures at Harvard University. Before coming to Princeton, she held teaching posts at Yale University, Bard College, and Rutgers University. Goheen Professor of the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University in the spring of 1989. A short story she 'dashed off' about a little black girl who wanted blue eyes would be her first completed literary work, and the seed of her first novel, The Bluest Eye. It was in this setting that her creative instincts began to stir. Morrison found solace from the unhappy union in a small group of poets and writers who met informally to discuss their work. The couple had two sons before their marriage crumbled. Masters Degree in Hand, Toni returned to Howard University where she took a position teaching English, and where she met and married Jamaican architect Harold Morrison.

There, she completed a thesis on the theme of suicide in the works of Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. from Howard University in 1953, Toni Morrison continued on to Cornell to pursue graduate work in English. Other major awards include: the 1996 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Pearl Buck Award (1994), the title of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters (Paris, 1994), and 1978 Distinguished Writer Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.Īfter receiving her B.A. Her body of work was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993. In 1987, Beloved was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Morrison received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977 for Song of Solomon. Her six major novels- The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Sula, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz-have collected nearly every major literary prize.

The volume of critical and popular acclaim that has arisen around the work of Toni Morrison is virtually unparalleled in modern letters. Winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in literature

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