Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Author Spotlight

Toni Morrison (1931 -   )

Famous Works Include: The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Paradise, Love, A Mercy, Jazz, I Sula, The Big Box, and The Book of Mean People.

Morrison is quite the character -- she wrote her thesis on suicide in the works of Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. Her works too are somewhat polarizing, with difficult, controversial subject matter. She is also quite out-spoken; she famously called Bill Clinton "the first black President," saying that "Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas."

Her gregarious nature seems to have served her well, though, as she is the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Morrison has also won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 for Beloved, which has been made into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover.

Hope you've enjoyed this blast from the past from a 2008 edition of the WCWC!

- Anna H.