Interview by Rebecca Gross
Talking to Toni Morrison about failure is a bit like talking to Einstein about stupidity: it’s incongruous, to say the least. At 83, Morrison is one of the world’s best-known and most successful novelists, her awards list crammed with the heavyweights of literary prizes: among them, the 1988 Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award for Beloved; the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 (the last U.S. author to receive it); the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012; and most recently, the Ivan Sandroff Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. As these accolades piled up, Morrison continued to work full-time as an editor or a professor of writing and literature—she wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), while teaching at Howard University and raising two young sons on her own. Since then, she has written ten more novels (God Help the Child will be published later this year), several children’s books, two plays, and a number of nonfiction works. In all her projects, her words are at once incisive as a knife and poignant as a lullaby, weaving mesmerizing narratives that probe the complexities of the African-American experience. - Read the Rest
