Introduction: The Legacies of Toni Morrison

Introduction: The Legacies of Toni Morrison Rebecca Nicholson Weir (bio) and DeLinda Marzette (bio) "I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it was like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now."1 —Salon interview with Zia Jaffey "I can't tell you how satisfying it is to know I have earned a readership that is that large, as large as it is. I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. Claimed it as central. And let the rest of the world move over to where I was." —Television interview with Jana Wendt2 Toni Morrison (1931–2019) leaves an indelible imprint on the national and international literary landscape. The author of eleven novels, five children's books, two plays, and nine non-fiction texts, Morrison's powerful prose—at once scathing and soothing, always insightful—has been translated to reach the minds and hearts of readers of fifteen languages ranging from Chinese, Italian, and French to Persian, Hebrew, and Czech. Morrison's novel Sula was nominated for the National Book Award in 1973 and Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1978. In 1988 her fifth novel Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize and in 1993 Morrison was the first African American writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The New York Times declared Morrison a "great novelist and the closest thing the country has to a national writer,"3 and within days of her death from pneumonia at age 88 she was already being remembered as "America's conscience."4 As A.J. Verdelle points out in Miss Chloe: A Memoir of a Literary Friendship with Toni Morrison, in the years since her death "Toni Morrison's voice does not quiet; nor does it become less salient or significant."5 If anything, in the fifty four years since the publication of her first novel The Bluest Eye (1970) and almost five years since her death in 2019, the interest in Toni Morrison—from scholars, literary critics, and general readers alike—continues unabated.6 Alongside these accolades, Toni Morrison's writing is frequently an inflection point for library censorship and school board book bans. End Page 1 Herself a lifelong advocate for the freedom of writers, Morrison's own novels regularly top K-12 book ban lists despite a place of prominence in the Common Core and many university syllabi. Morrison's first novel The Bluest Eye was the second most banned book for the 2022–2023 school year. As PEN America notes, the objections are not solely about "age appropriate" content, but "overwhelmingly, book bans target books on race or racism or featuring characters of color, as well as books with LGBTQ+ characters."7 In the essay "Peril," adapted from her 2008 acceptance speech for the PEN/Borders Literary Service award, Morrison simultaneously points out the power of writing to provoke as well as the dangers of its censorship: "the alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow."8 The ongoing celebration and censorship of Morrison's work testify in tandem to her prominence in American letters and the lasting power of her language. Before she was a world-famous writer, Toni Morrison worked as an editor from 1967 to 1983, rising through the ranks to be the first African American woman to serve as a senior fiction editor at Random House. While there she actively sought out and advocated for publishing Black writers, thinkers, and celebrities like Angela Davis, Gayl Jones, Huey P. Newton, and Muhammad Ali through the editorial process. Morrison's tenure at Random House is also notable for her work alongside Middleton A. Harris and other archivists and collectors on The Black Book, an encyclopedic project best described as assemblage in its resemblance to works of art that unite found, often fragmented elements to create sculptural forms. Groundbreaking in...