A man embarks on an odyssey across the United States to locate his ancestral home; a girl, living in poverty, has one sole wish of becoming beautiful; a mother, escaped from slavery, is haunted by the literal, and metaphorical, ghosts of her past. These are just a few of the remarkable characters from the literary world of Toni Morrison.
Awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, Morrison was a literary tour-de-force who weaved rich tapestries of the Black Experience, as fantastical as it can be uncomfortable, “giving life to an essential aspect of American reality.” Through the eleven books she penned prior to her death in 2019, Morrison’s novels are considered a love letter to African-Americans, presenting their lives, with their quirky eccentricities, as a multitude of experiences that craft who they are as people.
Morrison’s characters are far from perfect. They sometimes do reprehensible things, but this only goes to show how, even though she mainly foregrounds black people in her writing, her work deals with something even bigger: what it means to be human.
…her work deals with something even bigger: what it means to be human.
She powerfully writes in Beloved (1987), her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, speaking not just to the members of the black community, but anyone who has faced adversity, “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
