“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

On Monday, August 5, 2019, author, editor, and teacher Toni Morrison passed away. 

Morrison was nearly 40 when her first book, The Bluest Eye, was published. She went on to become the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature for her “novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, giv[ing] life to an essential aspect of American reality.” She earned the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award for her novel Beloved and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon. In 2012,  she was presented with Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

Morrison’s writing brought consciousness of the Black experience in America with novels that were both popular and critically acclaimed– in addition to her literary accolades, she was an Oprah Book Club pick four times. As an editor, she helped develop and edit works by Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, Toni Cade Bambara, Huey Newton, Henry Dumas, and Gayl Jones. 

If you’re interested in reading more of Toni Morrison or experiencing her for the first time, the library has many of her works in our Main and Orange County Campus collections.