Existing comment:
Toni Morrison
1931–2019
Born Lorain, Ohio
In her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), Toni Morrison used multiple perspectives and a splintered narrative to examine the subjectivities of Black girls who struggle against, and sometimes submit to, the self-loathing that white beauty ideals would have them internalize. Morrison won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon (1977) and the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987). In 1993, when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the committee described her as an author "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."
This photograph of Morrison appeared on the cover of Time magazine on January 19, 1998, following the release of her novel Paradise. The book is the final installment of her highly acclaimed trilogy examining post-Civil War Black life, which also includes Beloved and Jazz (1992). In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Deborah Feingold (born 1951)
Chromogenic print, 1998 Time cover, January19, 1998
Gift of Time magazine |