SAIGONTECHNOLOGY UNIVERSITY

INTERNATIONAL TRANING PROGRAMS CENTER

TROY UNIVERSITY
AMERICAN LITERATURE II

TONI MORRISON
Instructor: Trng Th Kim Lin, MA. Student: Nguyn Tng Huy 1314291

Class:

Wednesday Morning

HO CHI MINH CITY 2012

1. Introduction
Toni Morrison (born on Feb 18, 1931) is a famous American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon and Beloved. She also was commissioned to write the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, first performed in 2005. She won the Nobel Prize in 1993 and in 1987 the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved. In April 2012, it was announced she would be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and on 29 May 2012, she received the award.
1.1 Topic:

The life and career of African American writer: Toni Morrison.

To understand clearly about Toni Morrisons life. Understanding her writing career Some of her works and awards

1.3 Research question(s):

What is Toni Morrisons background? What is her writing career? What are some works written by Toni Morrison and her awards?

2. Literature review
2.1 Summary about Toni Morrison: Toni Morrison (born on Feb 18, 1931) is a famous African American novelist, editor, and a universitys professor whose novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. She won many awards in her life and one of the biggest awards is the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She is the first black person who received this award. Biography of Toni Morrison: Early life: Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio to Ramah (ne Willis) and George Wofford. She is the second of four children in a working-class family. As a child, Morrison read fervently; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. Morrison's father told her numerous folktales of the black community (a method of storytelling that would later work its way into Morrison's writings). In 1949, Morrison entered Howard University, where she received a B.A. in English in 1953. She earned a Master of Arts degree in English from Cornell University in 1955, for which she wrote a thesis on suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. After graduation, Morrison became an English instructor at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas (195557), then returned to Howard to teach English. She became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

In 1958, she married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect and fellow faculty member at Howard University. They had two children, Harold and Slade, and divorced in 1964. After the divorce she moved to Syracuse, New York, where she worked as a textbook editor. A year and a half later, she went to work as an editor at the New York City headquarters of Random House. As an editor, Morrison played a vital role in bringing black literature into the mainstream, editing books by authors such as Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Gail Jones. Later life: Morrison taught English at two branches of the State University of New York. In 1984 she was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University at Albany, The State University of New York. From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University. Though based in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton, Morrison did not regularly offer writing workshops to students after the late 1990s, a fact that earned her some criticism. Rather, she has conceived and developed the prestigious Princeton Atelier, a program that brings together talented students with critically acclaimed, world-famous artists. Together the students and the artists produce works of art that are presented to the public after a semester of collaboration. In her position at Princeton, Morrison used her insights to encourage not merely new and emerging writers, but artists working to develop new forms of art through interdisciplinary play and cooperation. At its 1979 commencement ceremonies, Barnard College awarded her its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction. Oxford University awarded her an honorary Doctor of Letters degree in June 2005. In November 2006, Morrison visited the Louvre Museum in Paris as the second in its "Grand Invitee" program to guest-curate a month-long series of events across the arts on the theme of "The Foreigner's Home." Inspired by her curatorship, Morrison returned to Princeton in fall 2008 to lead a small seminar, also entitled "The Foreigner's Home." In May 2010, Morrison appeared at PEN World Voices for a conversation with Marlene van Niekerk and Kwame Anthony Appiah about South African literature, and specifically, van Nickers novel, Agaat. In May 2011, Morrison received an Honorable Doctor of Letters Degree from Rutgers University during commencement where she delivered a speech of the "pursuit of life, liberty, meaningfulness, integrity, and truth". On March 15, 2012, she established a residency at Oberlin College. She is currently a member of the editorial board of The Nation magazine.

Familys background: Toni Morrison was the second oldest of four children. Her father, George Wofford, worked primarily as a welder, but held several jobs at once to support the family. Her mother, Ramah, was a domestic worker. Morrison later credited her parents with instilling in her a love of reading, music, and folklore. Her mother's parents, Ardelia and John Solomon Willis, had left Greenville, Alabama, around 1910 after they lost their farm because of debts that they could not repay. Morrison's father's family left Georgia and moved north to escape sharecropping (a system of farming in which a farmer works on someone else's land and pays the owner a share of the crop) and violence against African Americans in the South. Both families settled in the steel-mill town of Lorain on Lake Erie. Morrison grew up during the Great Depression in the 1930s, a time of severe economic hardship. Her father supported the family by working three jobs for seventeen years. While at Howard, Toni met Harold Morrison, a young architect from Jamaica who also taught at the university. The couple married in 1958 and had two sons, Harold (also known as Ford) and Slade, before divorcing in 1964. Then Morrison went to Syracuse, New York, and began working as an editor for a company. Writing style: For Morrison, "all good art has been political" and the black artist has a responsibility to the black community. She aims at capturing "the something that defines what makes a book 'black.' And that has nothing to do with whether the people in the books are black or not." She thinks that one characteristic of black writers is "a quality of hunger and disturbance that never ends." Her novels "bear witness" to the experience of the black community and blacks in that community. Her work "suggests who the outlaws were, who survived under what circumstances and why, what was legal in the community as opposed to what was legal outside it." In the past, music expressed these things and "kept us alive. Unfortunately music no longer serves this function and other forms of expressions, like the novel, are needed." Themes and practices in Morrisons novels include: Sense of Loss Roots, community, and identity Ancestors Extreme situations Freedom and Bad Men Responsibility Good and Evil Loss of Innocence

Morrisons writing career:

Morrison began writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard who met to discuss their work. She went to one meeting with a short story about a black girl who longed to have blue eyes. She later developed the story as her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970). She wrote it while raising two children and teaching at Howard. In 2000 it was chosen as a selection for Oprah's Book Club. In 1975 her novel Sula (1973) was nominated for the National Book Award. Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), brought her national attention. The book was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1987 Morrison's novel Beloved became a critical success. When the novel failed to win the National Book Award as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, a number of writers protested over the omission. Shortly afterward, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the American Book Award. That same year, Morrison took a visiting professorship at Bard College. Beloved was adapted into the 1998 film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. Morrison later used Margaret Garner's life story again in the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, with music by Richard Daniel pour. In May 2006, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best American novel published in the previous twenty-five years. In 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her citation reads: Toni Morrison, "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." She is currently the last American to have been awarded the honor. Shortly afterward, a fire destroyed her Rockland County, New York home. In 1996 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Morrison's lecture, entitled "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations," began with the aphorism, "Time, it seems, has no future." She cautioned against the misuse of history to diminish expectations of the future. Morrison was honored with the 1996, National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which is awarded to a writer "who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work." Although her novels typically concentrate on black women, Morrison does not identify her works as feminist. She has stated that she thinks "it's off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I'm involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don't subscribe to patriarchy, and I don't think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it's a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things." In addition to her novels, Morrison has also co-written books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison, who worked as a painter and musician. Slade died on December 22, 2010, aged 45.

In writing about the impeachment in 1998, Morrison wrote that, since White-water, Bill Clinton had been mistreated because of his "Blackness": Years ago, in the middle of the White-water investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President that blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our childrens lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, workingclass, and saxophone-playing, McDonalds-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. The phrase "our first Black president" was adopted as a positive by Bill Clinton supporters. When the Congressional Black Caucus honored the former president at its dinner in Washington D.C. on September 29, 2001, for instance, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), the chair, told the audience that Clinton "took so many initiatives he made us think for a while we had elected the first black president."

Works:

Novels

The Bluest Eye (1970) Sula (1974) Song of Solomon (1977) Tar Baby (1981) Beloved (1987) Jazz (1992) Paradise (1997) Love (2003) A Mercy (2008) Home (2012) The Big Box (1999) The Book of Mean People (2002) Peeny Butter Fudge (2009) "Recitatif" (1983) Dreaming Emmett (performed 1986) Desdemona (first performed 15 May 2011 in Vienna)

Children's literature (with Slade Morrison)

Short fiction Plays

Libretti

Margaret Garner (first performed May 2005)

Non-fiction
The Black Book (1974) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (editor) (1992) Birth of a Nation hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case (co-editor) (1997) Remember: The Journey to School Integration (April 2004) What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn C. Denard (April 2008) Burn This Book: Essay Anthology, editor (2009) Awards: 1977 National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon 1977 American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award 1987-88 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award 1988 Helm Erich Award 1988 American Book Award for Beloved 1988 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations for Beloved 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved 1988 Frederic G. Melcher Book Award for Beloved. A remark in her acceptance speech that there is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby honoring the memory of the human beings forced into slavery and brought to the United States. Theres no small bench by the road, led the Toni Morrison Society to begin installing benches at significant sites in the history of slavery in America; the first bench by the road was dedicated July 26, 2008 on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, the point of entry for approximately 40 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to British North America. 1989 MLA Commonwealth Award in Literature 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature 1993 Commander of the Arts and Letters, Paris 1994 Condorcet Medal, Paris 1994 Pearl Buck Award 1994 Rhegium Julii Prize for Literature 1996 Jefferson Lecture 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters 2000 National Humanities Medal

2002 100 Greatest African Americans, list by Molefi Kete Asante. 2005 Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Oxford University. 2009 Norman Mailer Prize, Lifetime Achievement 2011 Honorary Doctor of Letters at Rutgers University Graduation Commencement. 2011 Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Geneva. 2012 Announced to receive Presidential Medal of Freedom 2012 Presidential Medal of Freedom

3. Result
Toni Morrison is an African American writer. She has left to humanity many priceless works and goes to the heart. Most of her novels focus on life of black people. Most of them include women and children. In her life, she fight for freedom and happy of black men by her works. Although she is a writer, a universitys professor, she also works at many part of society works. Her voice had affected on politic while she call Bill Clinton is the first Black American President. With many things she can do for African American people through her writing skills, she received many awards about literature prize and Medal of Freedom.

4. Conclusion
In my opinion, Toni Morrison is an interested writer in America. Many of Morrison's novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Having grown up in working-class family, Morrison became one of most famous African American writer. With many interested novels and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1993, Toni Morrison would become one of the best woman writers in American literatures history.

References
Biography of Toni Morrison: Wikipedia, 2012, from (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison). "Toni Morrison - Biography". Nobelprize.org. 12 Jun 2012 (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrisonbio.html) Familys background: (n.d.), June 11, 2012, from (http://www.notablebiographies.com/Mo-Ni/MorrisonToni.html#b) Writing style: (n.d.), 2012, from. (http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/morrison.html). Writing career: Wikipedia, 2012, from (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison) Works: Wikipedia, 2012, from (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison) Awards: Wikipedia, 2012, from (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison)