Toni Morrison: the Pieces I Am
DVD
PS 3563 .O8749 T66 2019
In January of 2019, this documentary about the author premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, the film follows Morrison's life and literary career.
Playing in the Dark by
The Nobel Prize-winning author now gives us a learned, stylish, and immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that promises to change the way we read American literature even as it opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race. Toni Morrison's brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. She shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. Written with the artistic vision that has earned Toni Morrison a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature. "By going for the American literary jugular...she places her arguments...at the very heart of contemporary public conversation about what it is to be authentically and originally American. [She] boldly...reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." --Chicago Tribune "Toni Morrison is the closest thing the country has to a national writer." The New York Times Book Review
What Moves at the Margin by
What Moves at the Margin collects three decades of Toni Morrison's writings about her work, her life, literature, and American society. The works included in this volume range from 1971, when Morrison (b. 1931) was a new editor at Random House and a beginning novelist, to 2002 when she was a professor at Princeton University and Nobel Laureate. Even in the early days of her career, in between editing other writers, writing her own novels, and raising two children, she found time to speak out on subjects that mattered to her. From the reviews and essays written for major publications to her moving tributes to other writers to the commanding acceptance speeches for major literary awards, Morrison has consistently engaged as a writer outside the margins of her fiction. These works provide a unique glimpse into Morrison's viewpoint as an observer of the world, the arts, and the changing landscape of American culture. The first section of the book, "Family and History," includes Morrison's writings about her family, Black women, Black history, and her own works. The second section, "Writers and Writing," offers her assessments of writers she admires and books she reviewed, edited at Random House, or gave a special affirmation to with a foreword or an introduction. The final section, "Politics and Society," includes essays and speeches where Morrison addresses issues in American society and the role of language and literature in the national culture. Among other pieces, this collection includes a reflection on 9/11, reviews of such seminal books by Black writers as Albert Murray's South to a Very Old Place and Gayl Jones's Corregidora, an essay on teaching moral values in the university, a eulogy for James Baldwin, and Morrison's Nobel lecture. Taken together, What Moves at the Margin documents the response to our time by one of American literature's most thoughtful and eloquent writers. Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor Emerita at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University and is the author of Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Paradise, and other novels. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. Carolyn C. Denard is the author of scholarly essays on Toni Morrison and the forthcoming Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison. She is Associate Dean of the College at Brown University and founder of the Toni Morrison Society.
Remember by
Toni Morrison has collected a treasure chest of archival photographs that depict the historical events surrounding school desegregation. These unforgettable images serve as the inspiration for Ms. Morrison's text--a fictional account of the dialogue and emotions of the children who lived during the era of "separate but equal" schooling. Remember is a unique pictorial and narrative journey that introduces children to a watershed period in American history and its relevance to us today.
Toni Morrison is an American novelist and Nobel laureate. Her widely read works, written in lyrical, often colloquial language, combine realism with myth and symbolism to explore the American black experience and the influence of public attitudes on one's conception of self. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993, becoming the first black woman to receive it.
Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on Feb. 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, the second of four children in a black working-class family. As a child, she became intrigued with the songs and folktales of Southern black culture. She went on to graduate from Howard University (1953) and earn a master's degree from Cornell (1955), writing a thesis on suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. Over the next ten years, she taught English literature at Texas Southern University and then Howard University. In the mid-1960s she became a fiction editor for Random House and also started writing fiction herself. She returned to academia to teach in creative writing programs at the State University of New York at Albany (1984-89) and Princeton University (1989-2006). Morrison became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1981.
Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), won critical admiration, though not immediate commercial success; it dealt with the struggles of a poor abused black girl obsessed by white standards of beauty. Her next novel, Sula (1973), looks at the friendship between two black women, and their differing responses to the rigid moral code of their black community. (Image: Time) (Content: Facts on File)
Sula by
Nominated for the National Book Award, this rich and moving novel traces the lives of two black heroines-from their growing up in a small Ohio town, through their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation.
Song of Solomon by
Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, a novel of large beauty and power, creates a magical world out of four generations of black life in America.
Tar Baby by
The author of Song of Solomon now sets her extraordinary novelistic powers on a striking new course. Tar Baby, audacious and hypnotic, is masterful in its mingling of tones--of longing and alarm, of urbanity and a primal, mythic force in which the landscape itself becomes animate, alive with a wild, dark complicity in the fates of the people whose drama unfolds. It is a novel suffused with a tense and passionate inquiry, revealing a whole spectrum of emotions underlying the relationships between black men and women, white men and women, and black and white people.
Beloved by
Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.
Jazz by
Set in Harlem in the 1920s, this novel chronicles a bittersweet triangle involving a middle-aged door-to-door salesman, his mentally unstable wife, and his eighteen-year-old girlfriend.
Paradise by
In Paradise--her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature--Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain," assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void "Out There . . . where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose." Richly imagined and elegantly composed, Paradise weaves a powerful mystery.
Love by
his audacious exploration into the nature of love; its appetite, its sublime possession, its dread; is rich in characters, striking scenes, and a profound understanding of how alive the past can be.
A Mercy by
A powerful tragedy distilled into a jewel of a masterpiece by the Nobel Prize winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier.
Home by
America's most celebrated novelist, Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison extends her profound take on our history with this twentieth-century tale of redemption: a taut and tortured story about one man's desperate search for himself in a world disfigured by war.
God Help the Child by
Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child--the first novel by Toni Morrison to be set in our current moment--weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult.