Toni Morrison (1981)

Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, editor, and playwright. Her sense of writing’s spectacular power is evident in her statement, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” Morrison’s precise and exuberant language has swept her audience into pain and wonder as her vivid characters search for love, beauty, and identity: Pecola in The Bluest Eye, Macon Dead’s odyssey into self-discovery in Song of Solomon; Sula, Nel, and Wright locked in a complex friendship in Sula. Rooted in fable, mythology, realism, and family history, Morrison’s novels reveal timeless truths told as if for the first time. Her work “familiarizes the strange and mystifies the familiar.”