Toni morrison

George Saunders, Mary Karr, Jacqueline Woodson, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Alexander Chee commemorate the author Toni Morrison and the expansive influence of her work.

Editor’s note: Author and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison died on Aug. 5, 2019 at 88 years old. This story was originally published on July 15, 2019. For years, on…

In the History of Interdisciplinary Arts course, we will be focusing on a time and place in history, and each student will choose an artist on which to focus their inquiry. We were asked to pick a decade and a city and to choose someone who was “then & there.” The top three picks were London in the ’70s, Chicago in the ’60s, and New York in the ’70s. All of these choices promised to be full of interesting, dynamic, and/or powerful characters. There was a run-off between the top two choices…

Toni Morrison joined the faculty of Princeton University in 1989 as the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities. She has also been associated with the faculty of the Program in Creative Writing, and was the founding director of the Princeton Atelier, which brings acclaimed artists together with students to create projects in a workshop environ

Hilton Als interviews Toni Morrison in 2015 at The New Yorker Festival, about writing her novels, including “Beloved,” “Sula,” “Jazz,” and others, and how her relationship with her father shaped her understanding of the world.

Readers could sense in Morrison’s fiction the influences of Ralph Ellison, the Bible and William Faulkner, among others, but her idiosyncratic music was her own.

Generations of authors, editors and other artists and luminaries pay tribute to “the greatest chronicler of the American experience that we have ever known.”