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Toni Morrison
Morrison in 1998
Born	Chloe Ardelia Wofford (1931-02-18)February 18, 1931 Lorain, Ohio, U.S.
Died	August 5, 2019(2019-08-05) (aged 88) The Bronx, New York City, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist essayist children's writer professor
Education	Howard University (BA) Cornell University (MA)
Genre	Literary fiction
Notable works	The Bluest Eye (1970) Sula (1973) Song of Solomon (1977) Tar Baby (1981) Beloved (1987)
Notable awards	Presidential Medal of Freedom National Humanities Medal Nobel Prize in Literature Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Spouse	Harold Morrison ​ ​(m. 1958; div. 1964)​
Children	2
Signature
Quotations related to Toni Morrison at Wikiquote

Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. Morrison earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor for fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her novel Beloved was made into a film in 1998. Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience.

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, in 1996. She was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on May 29, 2012. She received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. Morrison was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020.

Early years

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, the second of four children from a working-class, Black family, in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford. Her mother was born in Greenville, Alabama, and moved north with her family as a child. She was a homemaker and a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. George Wofford grew up in Cartersville, Georgia. When Wofford was about 15 years old, a group of white people lynched two African-American businessmen who lived on his street. Morrison later said: "He never told us that he'd seen bodies. But he had seen them. And that was too traumatic, I think, for him." Soon after the lynching, George Wofford moved to the racially integrated town of Lorain, Ohio, in the hope of escaping racism and securing gainful employment in Ohio's burgeoning industrial economy. He worked odd jobs and as a welder for U.S. Steel. In a 2015 interview Morrison said that her father, traumatized by his experiences of racism, hated whites so much he would not let them in the house.

When Morrison was about two years old, her family's landlord set fire to the house in which they lived, while they were home, because her parents could not afford to pay rent. Her family responded to what she called this "bizarre form of evil" by laughing at the landlord rather than falling into despair. Morrison later said her family's response demonstrated how to keep your integrity and claim your own life in the face of acts of such "monumental crudeness".

Morrison's parents instilled in her a sense of heritage and language through telling traditional African-American folktales, ghost stories, and singing songs. She read frequently as a child; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy.

Morrison became a Catholic at the age of 12 and took the baptismal name Anthony (after Anthony of Padua), which led to her nickname, Toni. Attending Lorain High School, she was on the debate team, the yearbook staff, and in the drama club.

Career

Adulthood, Howard and Cornell years, and editing career: 1949–1975

In 1949, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., seeking the company of fellow black intellectuals. She was the first person in her family to attend college, meaning that she was a first-generation college student. Initially a student in the drama program at Howard, she studied theatre with celebrated drama teachers Anne Cooke Reid and Owen Dodson. It was while at Howard that she encountered racially segregated restaurants and buses for the first time. She graduated in 1953 with a B.A. in English and a minor in Classics, and was able to work with key members of the Harlem Renaissance era such as Alain Lock and Sterling Brown. Additionally, she participated in the university's theater group, known as the Howard Players, where she had the opportunity to travel the Deep South, which was a defining experience of her life.

Morrison went on to earn a Master of Arts degree in 1955 from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Her master's thesis was titled "Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's treatment of the alienated". She taught English, first at Texas Southern University in Houston from 1955 to 1957, and then at Howard University for the next seven years. While teaching at Howard, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. Their first son was born in 1961 and she was pregnant with their second son when she and Harold divorced in 1964.

After her divorce and the birth of her son Slade in 1965, Morrison began working as an editor for L. W. Singer, a textbook division of publisher Random House, in Syracuse, New York. Two years later, she transferred to Random House in New York City, where she became their first black woman senior editor in the fiction department.

In that capacity, Morrison played a vital role in bringing Black literature into the mainstream. One of the first books she worked on was the groundbreaking Contemporary African Literature (1972), a collection that included work by Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and South African playwright Athol Fugard. She fostered a new generation of Afro-American writers, including poet and novelist Toni Cade Bambara, radical activist Angela Davis, Black Panther Huey Newton and novelist Gayl Jones, whose writing Morrison discovered. She also brought to publication the 1975 autobiography of the outspoken boxing champion Muhammad Ali, The Greatest: My Own Story. In addition, she published and promoted the work of Henry Dumas, a little-known novelist and poet who in 1968 had been shot to death by a transit officer in the New York City Subway.

Among other books that Morrison developed and edited is The Black Book (1974), an anthology of photographs, illustrations, essays, and documents of Black life in the United States from the time of slavery to the 1920s. Random House had been uncertain about the project but its publication met with a good reception. Alvin Beam reviewed the anthology for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, writing: "Editors, like novelists, have brain children – books they think up and bring to life without putting their own names on the title page. Mrs. Morrison has one of these in the stores now, and magazines and newsletters in the publishing trade are ecstatic, saying it will go like hotcakes."

First writings and teaching, 1970–1986

Morrison had begun writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard University who met to discuss their work. She attended one meeting with a short story about a Black girl who longed to have blue eyes. Morrison later developed the story as her first novel, The Bluest Eye, getting up every morning at 4 am to write, while raising two children on her own.

The Bluest Eye was published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston in 1970, when Morrison was aged 39. It was favorably reviewed in The New York Times by John Leonard, who praised Morrison's writing style as being "a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry ... But The Bluest Eye is also history, sociology, folklore, nightmare and music." The novel did not sell well at first, but the City University of New York put The Bluest Eye on its reading list for its new Black studies department, as did other colleges, which boosted sales. The book also brought Morrison to the attention of the acclaimed editor Robert Gottlieb at Knopf, an imprint of the publisher Random House. Gottlieb later edited all but one of Morrison's novels.

In 1975, Morrison's second novel Sula (1973), about a friendship between two Black women, was nominated for the National Book Award. Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), follows the life of Macon "Milkman" Dead III, from birth to adulthood, as he discovers his heritage. This novel brought her national acclaim, being 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. Song of Solomon also won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

At its 1979 commencement ceremonies, Barnard College awarded Morrison its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction.

Morrison gave her next novel, Tar Baby (1981), a contemporary setting. In it, a looks-obsessed fashion model, Jadine, falls in love with Son, a penniless drifter who feels at ease with being Black.

Resigning from Random House in 1983, Morrison left publishing to devote more time to writing, while living in a converted boathouse on the Hudson River in Nyack, New York. She taught English at two branches of the State University of New York (SUNY) and at Rutgers University's New Brunswick campus. In 1984, she was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University at Albany, SUNY.

Morrison's first play, Dreaming Emmett, is about the 1955 murder by white men of Black teenager Emmett Till. The play was commissioned by the New York State Writers Institute at the State University of New York at Albany, where she was teaching at the time. It was produced in 1986 by Capital Repertory Theatre and directed by Gilbert Moses. Morrison was also a visiting professor at Bard College from 1986 to 1988.

Beloved trilogy and the Nobel Prize: 1987–1998

In 1987, Morrison published her most celebrated novel, Beloved. It was inspired by the true story of an enslaved African-American woman, Margaret Garner, whose story Morrison had discovered when compiling The Black Book. Garner had escaped slavery but was pursued by slave hunters. Facing a return to slavery, Garner killed her two-year-old daughter but was captured before she could kill herself. Morrison's novel imagines the dead baby returning as a ghost, Beloved, to haunt her mother and family.

Beloved was a critical success and a bestseller for 25 weeks. The New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote that the scene of the mother killing her baby is "so brutal and disturbing that it appears to warp time before and after into a single unwavering line of fate". Canadian writer Margaret Atwood wrote in a review for The New York Times, "Ms. Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, Beloved will put them to rest."

Some critics panned Beloved. African-American conservative social critic Stanley Crouch, for instance, complained in his review in The New Republic that the novel "reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries", and that Morrison "perpetually interrupts her narrative with maudlin ideological commercials".

Despite overall high acclaim, Beloved failed to win the prestigious National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award. Forty-eight Black critics and writers, among them Maya Angelou, protested the omission in a statement that The New York Times published on January 24, 1988. "Despite the international stature of Toni Morrison, she has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve", they wrote. Two months later, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It also won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

Beloved is the first of three novels about love and African-American history, sometimes called the Beloved Trilogy. Morrison said they are intended to be read together, explaining: "The conceptual connection is the search for the beloved – the part of the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you." The second novel in the trilogy, Jazz, came out in 1992. Told in language that imitates the rhythms of jazz music, the novel is about a love triangle during the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. According to Lyn Innes, "Morrison sought to change not just the content and audience for her fiction; her desire was to create stories which could be lingered over and relished, not 'consumed and gobbled as fast food', and at the same time to ensure that these stories and their characters had a strong historical and cultural base."

In 1992, Morrison also published her first book of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), an examination of the African-American presence in White American literature. (In 2016, Time magazine noted that Playing in the Dark was among Morrison's most-assigned texts on U.S. college campuses, together with several of her novels and her 1993 Nobel Prize lecture.) Lyn Innes wrote in the Guardian obituary of Morrison, "Her 1990 series of Massey lectures at Harvard were published as Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), and explore the construction of a 'non-white Africanist presence and personae' in the works of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Cather and Hemingway, arguing that 'all of us are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes'."

Before the third novel of the Beloved Trilogy was published, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. The citation praised her as an author "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality". She was the first Black woman of any nationality to win the prize. In her acceptance speech, Morrison said: "We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."

In her Nobel lecture, Morrison talked about the power of storytelling. To make her point, she told a story. She spoke about a blind, old, Black woman who is approached by a group of young people. They demand of her, "Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? ... Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story."

In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for "distinguished intellectual 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 also 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".

The third novel of her Beloved Trilogy, Paradise, about citizens of an all-Black town, came out in 1997. The following year, Morrison was on the cover of Time magazine, making her only the second female writer of fiction and second Black writer of fiction to appear on what was perhaps the most significant U.S. magazine cover of the era.

Beloved onscreen and "the Oprah effect"

Also in 1998, the movie adaptation of Beloved was released, directed by Jonathan Demme and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey, who had spent ten years bringing it to the screen. Winfrey also stars as the main character, Sethe, alongside Danny Glover as Sethe's lover, Paul D, and Thandiwe Newton as Beloved.

The movie flopped at the box office. A review in The Economist opined that "most audiences are not eager to endure nearly three hours of a cerebral film with an original storyline featuring supernatural themes, murder, rape, and slavery". Film critic Janet Maslin, in her New York Times review "No Peace from a Brutal Legacy", called it a "transfixing, deeply felt adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel. ... Its linchpin is of course Oprah Winfrey, who had the clout and foresight to bring 'Beloved' to the screen and has the dramatic presence to hold it together." Film critic Roger Ebert suggested that Beloved was not a genre ghost story but the supernatural was used to explore deeper issues and the non-linear structure of Morrison's story had a purpose.

In 1996, television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey selected Song of Solomon for her newly launched Book Club, which became a popular feature on her Oprah Winfrey Show. An average of 13 million viewers watched the show's book club segments. As a result, when Winfrey selected Morrison's earliest novel The Bluest Eye in 2000, it sold another 800,000 paperback copies. John Young wrote in the African American Review in 2001 that Morrison's career experienced the boost of "The Oprah Effect, ... enabling Morrison to reach a broad, popular audience."

Winfrey selected a total of four of Morrison's novels over six years, giving Morrison's works a bigger sales boost than they received from her Nobel Prize win in 1993. The novelist also appeared three times on Winfrey's show. Winfrey said, "For all those who asked the question 'Toni Morrison again?'... I say with certainty there would have been no Oprah's Book Club if this woman had not chosen to share her love of words with the world." Morrison called the book club a "reading revolution".

Early 21st century

Morrison continued to explore different art forms, such as providing texts for original scores of classical music. She collaborated with André Previn on the song cycle Honey and Rue, which premiered with Kathleen Battle in January 1992, and on Four Songs, premiered at Carnegie Hall with Sylvia McNair in November 1994. Both Sweet Talk: Four Songs on Text and Spirits In the Well (1997) were written for Jessye Norman with music by Richard Danielpour, and, alongside Maya Angelou and Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Morrison provided the text for composer Judith Weir's woman.life.song commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Jessye Norman, which premiered in April 2000.

Morrison returned to Margaret Garner's life story, the basis of her novel Beloved, to write the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner. Completed in 2002, with music by Richard Danielpour, the opera was premièred on May 7, 2005, at the Detroit Opera House with Denyce Graves in the title role. Love, Morrison's first novel since Paradise, came out in 2003. In 2004, she put together a children's book called Remember to mark the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954 that declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional.

From 1997 to 2003, Morrison was an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.

In 2004, Morrison was invited by Wellesley College to deliver the commencement address, which has been described as "among the greatest commencement addresses of all time and a courageous counterpoint to the entire genre".

In June 2005, the University of Oxford awarded Morrison an honorary Doctor of Letters degree.

In the spring 2006, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best work of American fiction published in the previous 25 years, as chosen by a selection of prominent writers, literary critics, and editors. In his essay about the choice, "In Search of the Best", critic A. O. Scott said: "Any other outcome would have been startling since Morrison's novel has inserted itself into the American canon more completely than any of its potential rivals. With remarkable speed, 'Beloved' has, less than 20 years after its publication, become a staple of the college literary curriculum, which is to say a classic. This triumph is commensurate with its ambition since it was Morrison's intention in writing it precisely to expand the range of classic American literature, to enter, as a living Black woman, the company of dead White males like Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne and Twain."

In November 2006, Morrison visited the Louvre museum in Paris as the second in its "Grand Invité" program to guest-curate a month-long series of events across the arts on the theme of "The Foreigner's Home", about which The New York Times said: "In tapping her own African-American culture, Ms. Morrison is eager to credit 'foreigners' with enriching the countries where they settle."

Morrison's novel A Mercy, released in 2008, is set in the Virginia colonies of 1682. Diane Johnson, in her review in Vanity Fair, called A Mercy "a poetic, visionary, mesmerizing tale that captures, in the cradle of our present problems and strains, the natal curse put on us back then by the Indian tribes, Africans, Dutch, Portuguese, and English competing to get their footing in the New World against a hostile landscape and the essentially tragic nature of human experience."

Princeton years

From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University. She said she did not think much of modern fiction writers who reference their own lives instead of inventing new material, and she used to tell her creative writing students, "I don't want to hear about your little life, OK?" Similarly, she chose not to write about her own life in a memoir or autobiography.

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 conceived and developed the Princeton Atelier, a program that brings together students with writers and performing artists. Together the students and the artists produce works of art that are presented to the public after a semester of collaboration.

Inspired by her curatorship at the Louvre Museum, Morrison returned to Princeton in the fall 2008 to lead a small seminar, also entitled "The Foreigner's Home".

On November 17, 2017, Princeton University dedicated Morrison Hall (a building previously called West College) in her honor.

Final years: 2010–2019

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 Niekerk's 2004 novel Agaat.

Morrison wrote books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison, who was a painter and a musician. Slade died of pancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, aged 45, when Morrison's novel Home (2012) was half-completed.

In May 2011, Morrison received an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Rutgers University–New Brunswick. During the commencement ceremony, she delivered a speech on the "pursuit of life, liberty, meaningfulness, integrity, and truth".

In 2011, Morrison worked with opera director Peter Sellars and Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré on Desdemona, taking a fresh look at William Shakespeare's tragedy Othello. The trio focused on the relationship between Othello's wife Desdemona and her African nursemaid, Barbary, who is only briefly referenced in Shakespeare. The play, a mix of words, music and song, premiered in Vienna in 2011.

Morrison had stopped working on her latest novel when her son died in 2010, later explaining, "I stopped writing until I began to think, He would be really put out if he thought that he had caused me to stop. 'Please, Mom, I'm dead, could you keep going ...?'"

She completed Home and dedicated it to her son Slade. Published in 2012, it is the story of a Korean War veteran in the segregated United States of the 1950s who tries to save his sister from brutal medical experiments at the hands of a white doctor.

In August 2012, Oberlin College became the home base of the Toni Morrison Society, an international literary society founded in 1993, dedicated to scholarly research of Morrison's work.

Morrison's eleventh novel, God Help the Child, was published in 2015. It follows Bride, an executive in the fashion and beauty industry whose mother tormented her as a child for being dark-skinned, a trauma that has continued to dog Bride.

Morrison was a member of the editorial advisory board of The Nation, a magazine started in 1865 by Northern abolitionists.

Personal life

While teaching at Howard University from 1957 to 1964, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. She took his last name and became known as Toni Morrison. Their first son, Harold Ford, was born in 1961. She was pregnant when she and Harold divorced in 1964. Her second son, Slade Kevin, was born in 1965.

Her son Slade Morrison died of pancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, when Morrison was halfway through writing her novel Home. She stopped work on the novel for a year or two before completing it; that novel was published in 2012.

Death

Morrison died at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, New York City, on August 5, 2019, from complications of pneumonia. She was 88 years old.

A memorial tribute was held on November 21, 2019, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. Morrison was eulogized by, among others, Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, Michael Ondaatje, David Remnick, Fran Lebowitz, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Edwidge Danticat. The jazz saxophonist David Murray performed a musical tribute.

Politics, literary reception, and legacy

Politics

Morrison spoke openly about American politics and race relations.

In writing about the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton, she claimed that since Whitewater, Bill Clinton was being mistreated in the same way Black people often are:

Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-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".

In the context of the 2008 Democratic Primary campaign, Morrison stated to Time magazine: "People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race." In the Democratic primary contest for the 2008 presidential race, Morrison endorsed Senator Barack Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton, though expressing admiration and respect for the latter. When he won, Morrison said she felt like an American for the first time. She said, "I felt very powerfully patriotic when I went to the inauguration of Barack Obama. I felt like a kid."

In April 2015, speaking of the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Walter Scott – three unarmed Black men killed by white police officers – Morrison said: "People keep saying, 'We need to have a conversation about race.' This is the conversation. I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back. And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a Black woman. Then when you ask me, 'Is it over?', I will say yes."

After the 2016 election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, Morrison wrote an essay, "Mourning for Whiteness", published in the November 21, 2016 issue of The New Yorker. In it she argues that white Americans are so afraid of losing privileges afforded them by their race that white voters elected Trump, whom she described as being "endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan", in order to keep the idea of white supremacy alive.

Relationship to feminism

Although her novels typically concentrate on black women, Morrison did not identify her works as feminist. When asked in a 1998 interview, "Why distance oneself from feminism?" she replied: "In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book – leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity." She went on to state that she thought it "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 2012, she responded to a question about the difference between black and white feminists in the 1970s. "Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves", she explained. "They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed."

W. S. Kottiswari writes in Postmodern Feminist Writers (2008) that Morrison exemplifies characteristics of "postmodern feminism" by "altering Euro-American dichotomies by rewriting a history written by mainstream historians" and by her usage of shifting narration in Beloved and Paradise. Kottiswari states: "Instead of western logocentric abstractions, Morrison prefers the powerful vivid language of women of color ... She is essentially postmodern since her approach to myth and folklore is re-visionist."

Contributions to Black feminism

Many of Toni Morrison's works have been cited by scholars as significant contributions to Black feminism, reflecting themes of race, gender, and sexual identity within her narratives.

Barbara Smith's 1977 essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism" argues that Toni Morrison's Sula is a work of Black feminism, as it presents a lesbian perspective that challenges heterosexual relationships and the conventional family unit. Smith states, “Consciously or not, Morrison's work poses both lesbian and feminist questions about Black women's autonomy and their impact upon each other's lives."

Hilton Als's 2003 profile in The New Yorker notes that “Before the late sixties, there was no real Black Studies curriculum in the academy—let alone a post-colonial-studies program or a feminist one. As an editor and author, Morrison, backed by the institutional power of Random House, provided the material for those discussions to begin.”

Toni Morrison consistently advocated for feminist ideas that challenge the dominance of the white patriarchal system, frequently rejecting the notion of writing from the perspective of the "white male gaze." Feminist political activist Angela Davis notes that “Toni Morrison's project resides precisely in the effort to discredit the notion that this white male gaze must be omnipresent.”

In a 1998 episode of Charlie Rose, Toni Morrison responded to a review of Sula, stating, “I remember a review of Sula in which the reviewer said, 'One day, she,' meaning me, 'will have to face up 'to the real responsibilities, and get mature, 'and write about the real confrontation 'for black people, which is white people.' As though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the white gaze, and I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.”

In a 2015 interview with The New York Times Magazine, Toni Morrison reiterated her intention to write without the white gaze, stating, “What I’m interested in is writing without the gaze, without the white gaze. In so many earlier books by African-American writers, particularly the men, I felt that they were not writing to me. But what interested me was the African-American experience throughout whichever time I spoke of. It was always about African-American culture and people — good, bad, indifferent, whatever — but that was, for me, the universe.”

Regarding the racial environment in which she wrote, Toni Morrison stated, “Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn’t even interesting. I was more interesting than they were. I knew more than they did. And I wasn’t afraid to show it.”

In a 1986 interview with Sandi Russell, Toni Morrison stated that she wrote primarily for Black women, explaining, “I write for black women. We are not addressing the men, as some white female writers do. We are not attacking each other, as both black and white men do. Black women writers look at things in an unforgiving/loving way. They are writing to repossess, re-name, re-own.”

In a 2003 interview, when asked about the labels "black" and "female" being attached to her work, Toni Morrison replied, "I can accept the labels because being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it. It’s richer than being a white male writer because I know more and I’ve experienced more.”

In a 1987 article in The New York Times, Toni Morrison argued for the greatness of being a Black woman, stating, “I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither. I really do. So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.''

National Memorial for Peace and Justice

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, includes writing by Morrison. Visitors can see her quote after they have walked through the section commemorating individual victims of lynching.

Papers

The Toni Morrison Papers are part of the permanent library collections of Princeton University, where they are held in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Morrison's decision to offer her papers to Princeton instead of to her alma mater Howard University was criticized by some within the historically black colleges and universities community.

Opening in February 2023, an exhibition titled Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory, which was curated from her archives at Princeton University, commemorated the 30th anniversary of her winning the Nobel Prize. Running from the week after her birthday until June 4, the exhibition featured rare manuscripts, correspondence between Morrison and others, and unfinished projects, taking its name from a 1995 essay by Morrison in which she spoke of a "journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply."

Day and halls

In 2019, a resolution was passed in her hometown of Lorain, Ohio, to designate February 18, her birthday, as Toni Morrison Day. Additional legislation was introduced to also proclaim that date as "Toni Morrison Day" throughout the State of Ohio. The legislation, HB 325, was passed by the Ohio House of Representatives on December 2, 2020, and signed into law by Governor Mike DeWine on December 21.

In 2021, Cornell University opened Toni Morrison Hall, a 178,869 square-foot residence hall and Morrison Dining in 2022, an adjacent dining hall designed by ikon.5 Architects.

During December 2023, the Toni Morrison Collective at Cornell University to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Morrison's Nobel win partnered with Calvary Baptist Church to give away free copies of two of Morrison's books and hold book talks in various locations. As explained by Anne V. Adams, professor emerita of Africana studies and comparative literature and chair of the Toni Morrison Collective: “The fact that Toni Morrison, during her first year as a master’s student, lodged at a house just a couple of doors up the street from historic Calvary Baptist Church created a perfect context for a collaboration."

Documentary films

Morrison was interviewed by Margaret Busby in London for a 1988 documentary film by Sindamani Bridglal, entitled Identifiable Qualities, shown on Channel 4.

Morrison was the subject of a film titled Imagine – Toni Morrison Remembers, directed by Jill Nicholls and shown on BBC One television on July 15, 2015, in which Morrison talked to Alan Yentob about her life and work.

In 2016, Oberlin College received a grant to complete a documentary film begun in 2014, The Foreigner's Home, about Morrison's intellectual and artistic vision, explored in the context of the 2006 exhibition she guest-curated at the Louvre. The film's executive producer was Jonathan Demme. It was directed by Oberlin College Cinema Studies faculty Geoff Pingree and Rian Brown, and incorporates footage shot by Morrison's first-born son Harold Ford Morrison, who also consulted on the film.

In 2019, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Those featured in the film include Morrison, Angela Davis, Oprah Winfrey, Fran Lebowitz, Sonia Sanchez, and Walter Mosley, among others.

Awards

• 1975: Ohioana Book Award for Sula
• 1977: National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon
• 1977: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award
• 1981: Langston Hughes Medal, City College of New York
• 1982: Ohio Women's Hall of Fame inductee
• 1986: New York State Governor's Arts Award
• 1988: Robert F. Kennedy Book Award
• 1988: Helmerich 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
• 1988: Honorary Doctor of Laws at University of Pennsylvania
• 1989: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Harvard University
• 1993: Nobel Prize in Literature
• 1993: Commander of the Arts and Letters, Paris
• 1994: Condorcet Medal, Paris
• 1994: Rhegium Julii Prize for Literature
• 1996: Jefferson Lecture
• 1996: National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
• 1997: Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Gustavus Adolphus College.
• 1998: Audie Award for Narration by the Author for Sula
• 2000: National Humanities Medal
• 2002: 100 Greatest African Americans, list by Molefi Kete Asante
• 2005: Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement
• 2005: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from University of Oxford
• 2005: Coretta Scott King Award for Remember: The Journey to School Integration
• 2008: New Jersey Hall of Fame inductee
• 2009: Norman Mailer Prize, Lifetime Achievement
• 2010: Officier de la Légion d'Honneur
• 2010: Institute for Arts and Humanities Medal for Distinguished Contributions to the Arts and Humanities from the Pennsylvania State University
• 2011: Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction
• 2011: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Rutgers University Graduation Commencement
• 2011: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Geneva
• 2012: Presidential Medal of Freedom
• 2013: The Nichols-Chancellor's Medal awarded by Vanderbilt University
• 2013: Honorary Doctorate of Literature awarded by Princeton University
• 2013: PEN Oakland – Josephine Miles Literary Award for Home
• 2013: Writer in Residence at the American Academy in Rome
• 2014: Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award given by the National Book Critics Circle
• 2016: PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction
• 2016: The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry (The Norton Lectures), Harvard University
• 2016: The Edward MacDowell Medal, awarded by the MacDowell Colony
• 2018: The Thomas Jefferson Medal, awarded by The American Philosophical Society
• 2020: National Women's Hall of Fame inductee
• 2020: Designation of "Toni Morrison Day" in Ohio, to be celebrated annually on her birthday, February 18
• 2021: Featured on "Cleveland is the Reason" mural in downtown Cleveland (with other notable Cleveland area figures)
• 2023: Featured on a USPS Forever stamp, designed by art director Ethel Kessler with photography by Deborah Feingold

Nomination

Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake? was a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children nominee in 2008.

Bibliography

Novels

• The Bluest Eye. Knopf. 1970. ISBN 0452287065.
• Sula. Knopf Doubleday Publishing. 1973. ISBN 140003343-8.
• Song of Solomon. Knopf Doubleday Publishing. 1977. ISBN 140003342X.
• Tar Baby. Knopf Doubleday Publishing. 1981. ISBN 1400033446.
• Beloved. Knopf. 1987. ISBN 1400033411.
• Jazz. Knopf Doubleday Publishing. 1992. ISBN 1400076218.
• Paradise. Knopf. 1998. ISBN 0679433740.
• Love. Knopf. 2003. ISBN 0375409440.
• A Mercy. Knopf. 2008. ISBN 978-0307264237.
• Home. Knopf. 2012. ISBN 978-0307594167.
• God Help the Child. Knopf. 2015. ISBN 978-0307594174.

Children's books (with Slade Morrison)

• The Big Box (1999). ISBN 978-0786823642.
• The Book of Mean People (2002). ISBN 978-0786805402.
• Remember: The Journey to School Integration (2004). ISBN 978-0618397402.
• Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper?, The Lion or the Mouse?, Poppy or the Snake? (2007). ISBN 978-0743283915.
• Peeny Butter Fudge (2009). ISBN 978-1442459007.
• Little Cloud and Lady Wind (2010). ISBN 1416985239.
• Please, Louise (2014). ISBN 978-1416983385.
• A Toni Morrison Treasury: The Big Box; The Ant or the Grasshopper?; The Lion or the Mouse?; Poppy or the Snake?; Peeny Butter Fudge; The Tortoise or the Hare; Little Cloud and Lady Wind; Please, Louise (2023). ISBN 9781665915540.

Short fiction

• "Recitatif", in Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka (eds), Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women (1983). A hardback book version, with an introduction by Zadie Smith, was published in February 2022 (US: Knopf; UK: Chatto & Windus).

Plays

• N'Orleans: The Storyville Musical (aka New Orleans) (performed 1982) with Donald McKayle
• Dreaming Emmett (performed 1986)
• Desdemona (first performed May 15, 2011, in Vienna)

Poetry

• Five Poems (2002, limited edition book with illustrations by Kara Walker)

Libretto

• Margaret Garner (first performed May 2005)

Non-fiction

• Foreword, The Black Photographers Annual Volume 1, edited by Joe Crawford (1973), OCLC 1783715
• Foreword and Preface, The Black Book edited by Harris, Levitt, Furman and Smith. Random House (1974), ISBN 978-1400068487
• Foreword, Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. Pantheon Books (1992), ISBN 978-0679741459
• Co-editor, Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case (1997), ISBN 978-0307482266
• Remember: The Journey to School Integration (2004), ISBN 978-0618397402
• Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992, 2007), ISBN 978-0307388636
• What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn C. Denard (2008), ISBN 978-1604730173
• Editor (2009), Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word, ISBN 978-0061878817
• The Origin of Others – The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Harvard University Press (2017), ISBN 978-0674976450
• Goodness and the Literary Imagination: Harvard Divinity School's 95th Ingersoll Lecture: With Essays on Morrison's Moral and Religious Vision. Edited by David Carrasco, Stephanie Paulsell, and Mara Willard. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press (2019)
• The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations. New York: Alfred A. Knopf (2019), ISBN 978-0525521037. UK edition published as Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations, London: Chatto & Windus (2019), ISBN 978-1784742850

Articles

• "Introduction." Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The Oxford Mark Twain, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. xxxii–xli.

See also

• American literature
• African-American literature
• List of black Nobel laureates
• List of female Nobel laureates

Notes

1. 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 – "There's 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 about 40 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to Colonial America.

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215. Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne (January 28, 2022). "Toni Morrison's Only Short Story Addresses Race by Avoiding Race". The New York Times.
216. O'Keeffe, Alice. "Preview | Recitatif". The Bookseller. Retrieved February 24, 2022.
217. Lawson, Carol (July 23, 1982). "BROADWAY; Book and lyrics of new musical by Toni Morrison". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved February 15, 2022.
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221. Li, Stephanie (Summer 2011). "Five Poems: The Gospel According to Toni Morrison". Callaloo. 34 (3): 899–914. doi:10.1353/cal.2011.0173. ISSN 1080-6512. S2CID 162544646.
222. "Five Poems by Toni Morrison". The Believer. August 6, 2019. Retrieved January 26, 2021.
223. Morrison, Toni (2007). Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0307388636.

External links

• Resources in your library
• Resources in other libraries

• Resources in your library
• Resources in other libraries

• Quotations related to Toni Morrison at Wikiquote
• Media related to Toni Morrison at Wikimedia Commons
• "Toni Morrison: Beloved". From the Bookworm archives, August 15, 2019.
• Bookworm Archived June 7, 2014, at the Wayback Machine Interviews (Audio) with Michael Silverblatt
• Schappell, Elissa; Claudia Brodsky Lacour (Fall 1993). "Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134". The Paris Review. Fall 1993 (128).
• Toni Morrison at IMDb 
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Toni Morrison on Charlie Rose
• Toni Morrison on Nobelprize.org
• "Reading the Writing: A Conversation with Toni Morrison" (Cornell University video, March 7, 2013)
• Toni Morrison at Random House Australia Archived July 26, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
• Toni Morrison collected news and commentary at The Guardian
• Toni Morrison collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Toni Morrison's oral history video excerpts at The National Visionary Leadership Project
• Toni Morrison Papers at Princeton University Library Special Collections
• Toni Morrison Society based at Oberlin College
• Works by Toni Morrison at Open Library

Links to related articles

v t e Works by Toni Morrison Novels The Bluest Eye (1970) Sula (1973) Song of Solomon (1977) Tar Baby (1981) Beloved (1987) Jazz (1992) Paradise (1997) Love (2003) A Mercy (2008) Home (2012) God Help the Child (2015) Short stories "Recitatif" (1983) Plays New Orleans (1982) Dreaming Emmett (1986) Desdemona (2011) Non-fiction The Black Book (compiled materials) (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 (edited collection) (1992) Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case (co-edited with Claudia Brodsky Lacour) (1997) Remember: The Journey to School Integration (2004) The Origin of Others (2017) The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019) Other Margaret Garner (2005 libretto) Adaptations Beloved (1998 film) v t e American Book Awards winners (1980–1999) 1980 Douglas Woolf Edward Dorn Jayne Cortez Leslie Marmon Silko Mei-mei Berssenbrugge Milton Murayama Quincy Troupe Rudolfo Anaya 1981 Alta Alan Chong Lau Bienvenido N. Santos Helen Adam Lionel Mitchell Miguel Algarín Nicholasa Mohr Peter Blue Cloud Robert Kelly Rose Drachler Susan Howe Toni Cade Bambara 1982 Al Young Duane Niatum E. L. Mayo Frank Chin Hilton Obenzinger Him Mark Lai / Genny Lim / Judy Yung Jerome Rothenberg Joyce Carol Thomas Leroy Quintana Lorna Dee Cervantes Ronald Phillip Tanaka Russell Banks Tato Laviera 1983 Barbara Christian Cecilia Liang Evangelina Vigil-Piñón Harriet Rohmer James D. Houston Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn John A. Williams Joy Kogawa Judy Grahn Nash Candelaria Peter Guralnick Seán Ó Tuama 1984 Cecil Brown Gary Snyder Howard Schwartz/ Mark Podwal Imamu Amiri Baraka Jesús Colón Joseph Bruchac Maurice Kenny Mei-mei Berssenbrugge Miné Okubo Paule Marshall Ruthanne Lum McCunn / You-shan Tang / Ellen Lai-shan Yeung Thomas McGrath Venkatesh Kulkarni William J. Kennedy 1985 Angela Jackson Arnold Genthe / John Kuo Wei Tchen Colleen J. McElroy Gary Soto Peter Irons Keiho Soga / Taisanboku Mori / Sojin Takei / Muin Ozaki Louise Erdrich Maureen Owen May Sarton Robert Edward Duncan Ron Jones Sandra Cisneros Sonia Sanchez Julia Vinograd William Oandasan 1986 Anna Lee Walters Cherríe Moraga / Gloria E. Anzaldúa Helen Barolini Jeff Hannusch Linda Hogan Miguel Algarín Natasha Borovsky Raymond Federman Susan Howe Terence Winch Toshio Mori 1987 Ai Ana Castillo Cyn Zarco Daniel McGuire Dorothy Bryant Etheridge Knight Gary Giddins Harvey Pekar James Welch John Wieners Juan Felipe Herrera Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum Michael Mayo Septima Poinsette Clark / Cynthia Stokes Brown Terry McMillan 1988 Allison Blakely Charles Olson Daisy Bates David Halberstam Edward Sanders Gerald Vizenor Jimmy Santiago Baca Kesho Y. Scott / Cherry Muhanji / Egyirba High Marlon K. Hom Benjamin Hoff Ronald Sukenick Salvatore La Puma Toni Morrison Wing Tek Lum / Tek Lum Lum 1989 Alma Luz Villanueva Askia M. Touré Audre Lorde Carolyn Lau Emory Elliott Eduardo Galeano Frank Chin Henry Louis Gates Isabel Allende J. California Cooper Jennifer Stone Josephine Gattuso Hendin Leslie Scalapino Shuntaro Tanikawa Charles Fanning William Minoru Hohri 1990 Adrienne Kennedy Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Daniela Gioseffi Elizabeth Woody Hualing Nieh Itabari Njeri James M. Freeman John C. Walter / J. Raymond Jones John Norton José Emilio González Sergei Kan Lloyd A. Thompson Martin Bernal Michelle T. Clinton / Sesshu Foster Miles Davis Paula Gunn Allen Shirley Geok-lin Lim / Mayumi Tsutakawa / Margarita Donnelly 1991 Alejandro Murguía bell hooks Bruce Wright Charley Trujillo D. H. Melhem Deborah Keenan Jessica Hagedorn John Edgar Wideman Joy Harjo Karen Tei Yamashita Lucia Berlin Mary Crow Dog Meridel Le Sueur Mill Hunk Herald Collective Nora Marks Dauenhauer / Richard Dauenhauer R. Baxter Miller Thomas Centolella 1992 A'Lelia Perry Bundles Art Spiegelman Benjamin Alire Sáenz Donna J. Haraway Fritjof Capra José Antonio Burciaga Keith Gilyard Lucy Thompson Norma Field Peter Bacho Peter Kalifornsky Raymond Andrews Sandra Scofield Sheila Hamanaka Verlyn Klinkenborg William B. Branch / Amiri Baraka / August Wilson 1993 Asake Bomani / Belvie Rooks Christopher Mogil / Peter Woodrow Cornel West Denise Giardina Diane Glancy Eugene B. Redmond Francisco X. Alarcón Gerald Graff Jack Beatty Leroy V. Quintana Katherine Peter Nelson George Ninotchka Rosca 1994 Giose Rimanelli Eric Drooker Graciela Limón Gregory J. Reed Janet Campbell Hale Jill Nelson Lawson Fusao Inada Nicole Blackman Paul Gilroy Ronald Takaki Rose L. Glickman Tino Villanueva Virginia L. Kroll 1995 Abraham Rodriguez Herb Boyd / Robert L. Allen Denise Chavez John Egerton John Ross Thomas Avena Linda Raymond Li-Young Lee Marianna De Marco Torgovnick Marnie Mueller Peter Quinn Sandra Martz Gordon Henry Jr. Tricia Rose 1996 Agate Nesaule Arthur Sze Chang-Rae Lee Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni E.J. Miller Laino Glenn C. Loury James W. Loewen Joe Sacco / Edward Said Kimiko Hahn Maria Espinosa Robert Viscusi Sherman Alexie Ron Sakolsky / Fred Weihan Ho Stephanie Cowell William H. Gass 1997 Alurista Derrick Bell Dorothy Barresi Guillermo Gómez-Peña Louis Owens Martín Espada Montserrat Fontes Noel Ignatiev Shirley Geok-lin Lim Sunaina Maira Thulani Davis Tom De Haven William M. Banks Brenda Knight 1998 Allison Adelle Hedge Coke Angela Y. Davis Brenda Marie Osbey Don DeLillo Jim Barnes John A. Williams Nancy Rawles Nora Okja Keller Sandra Benitez Scott DeVeaux Thomas Lynch 1999 Alice McDermott Anna Linzer Brian Ward Chiori Santiago E. Donald Two-Rivers Edwidge Danticat Judith Roche / Meg McHutchison Gioia Timpanelli Gloria Naylor James D. Houston Jerry Lipka / Gerald V. Mohatt / Ciulistet Group Trey Ellis Josip Novakovich Lauro Flores Luís Alberto Urrea Nelson George Speer Morgan Gary Gach Chiori Santiago / Judith Lowry v t e NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Nonfiction 1990s By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of 'Malcolm X – Spike Lee and Ralph Wiley (1993) No Award (1994) When We Were Colored – Clifton Taulbert (1995) No Award (1996) No Award (1997) With Ossie & Ruby: In This Life Together – Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee (1998) No Award (1999) 2000s No Award (2000) Sally Hemmings, An American Scandal – Tina Andrews (2001) Keeping the Faith: Stories of Love, Courage, Healing, and Hope from Black America – Tavis Smiley (2002) Why I Love Black Women – Michael Eric Dyson (2003) Hallelujah! The Welcome Table – Maya Angelou (2004) Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? – Michael Eric Dyson (2005) The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream – Barack Obama (2006) Not on Our Watch – Don Cheadle and John Prendergast (2007) Letter to My Daughter – Maya Angelou (2008) In Search of Our Roots – Henry Louis Gates Jr. (2009) 2010s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness – Michelle Alexander (2010) The Wealth Cure: Putting Money in Its Place – Hill Harper (2011) The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court – Jeffrey Toobin (2012) Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery – Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer (2013) Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption – Bryan Stevenson (2014) Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga – Pamela Newkirk (2015) Hidden Figures – Margot Lee Shetterly (2016) Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies – Dick Gregory (2017) For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics – Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah D. Daughtry, Minyon Moore, and Veronica Chambers (2018) The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations – Toni Morrison (2019) 2020s A Promised Land – Barack Obama (2020) The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story – Nikole Hannah-Jones (2021) Finding Me – Viola Davis (2022) The New Brownies’ Book: A Love Letter to Black Families – Karida L. Brown and Charly Palmer (2023) v t e Inductees to the National Women's Hall of Fame 1970–1979 1973 Jane Addams Marian Anderson Susan B. Anthony Clara Barton Mary McLeod Bethune Elizabeth Blackwell Pearl S. Buck Rachel Carson Mary Cassatt Emily Dickinson Amelia Earhart Alice Hamilton Helen Hayes Helen Keller Eleanor Roosevelt Florence Sabin Margaret Chase Smith Elizabeth Cady Stanton Helen Brooke Taussig Harriet Tubman 1976 Abigail Adams Margaret Mead Mildred "Babe" Didrikson Zaharias 1979 Dorothea Dix Juliette Gordon Low Alice Paul Elizabeth Bayley Seton 1980–1989 1981 Margaret Sanger Sojourner Truth 1982 Carrie Chapman Catt Frances Perkins 1983 Belva Lockwood Lucretia Mott 1984 Mary "Mother" Harris Jones Bessie Smith 1986 Barbara McClintock Lucy Stone Harriet Beecher Stowe 1988 Gwendolyn Brooks Willa Cather Sally Ride Mary Risteau Ida B. Wells-Barnett 1990–1999 1990 Margaret Bourke-White Barbara Jordan Billie Jean King Florence B. Seibert 1991 Gertrude Belle Elion 1993 Ethel Percy Andrus Antoinette Blackwell Emily Blackwell Shirley Chisholm Jacqueline Cochran Ruth Colvin Marian Wright Edelman Alice Evans Betty Friedan Ella Grasso Martha Wright Griffiths Fannie Lou Hamer Dorothy Height Dolores Huerta Mary Putnam Jacobi Mae Jemison Mary Lyon Mary Mahoney Wilma Mankiller Constance Baker Motley Georgia O'Keeffe Annie Oakley Rosa Parks Esther Peterson Jeannette Rankin Ellen Swallow Richards Elaine Roulet Katherine Siva Saubel Gloria Steinem Helen Stephens Lillian Wald Madam C. J. Walker Faye Wattleton Rosalyn S. Yalow Gloria Yerkovich 1994 Bella Abzug Ella Baker Myra Bradwell Annie Jump Cannon Jane Cunningham Croly Catherine East Geraldine Ferraro Charlotte Perkins Gilman Grace Hopper Helen LaKelly Hunt Zora Neale Hurston Anne Hutchinson Frances Wisebart Jacobs Susette La Flesche Louise McManus Maria Mitchell Antonia Novello Linda Richards Wilma Rudolph Betty Bone Schiess Muriel Siebert Nettie Stevens Oprah Winfrey Sarah Winnemucca Fanny Wright 1995 Virginia Apgar Ann Bancroft Amelia Bloomer Mary Breckinridge Eileen Collins Elizabeth Hanford Dole Anne Dallas Dudley Mary Baker Eddy Ella Fitzgerald Margaret Fuller Matilda Joslyn Gage Lillian Moller Gilbreth Nannerl O. Keohane Maggie Kuhn Sandra Day O'Connor Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin Pat Schroeder Hannah Greenebaum Solomon 1996 Louisa May Alcott Charlotte Anne Bunch Frances Xavier Cabrini Mary A. Hallaren Oveta Culp Hobby Wilhelmina Cole Holladay Anne Morrow Lindbergh Maria Goeppert Mayer Ernestine Louise Potowski Rose Maria Tallchief Edith Wharton 1998 Madeleine Albright Maya Angelou Nellie Bly Lydia Moss Bradley Mary Steichen Calderone Mary Ann Shadd Cary Joan Ganz Cooney Gerty Cori Sarah Grimké Julia Ward Howe Shirley Ann Jackson Shannon Lucid Katharine Dexter McCormick Rozanne L. Ridgway Edith Nourse Rogers Felice Schwartz Eunice Kennedy Shriver Beverly Sills Florence Wald Angelina Grimké Weld Chien-Shiung Wu 2000–2009 2000 Faye Glenn Abdellah Emma Smith DeVoe Marjory Stoneman Douglas Mary Dyer Sylvia A. Earle Crystal Eastman Jeanne Holm Leontine T. Kelly Frances Oldham Kelsey Kate Mullany Janet Reno Anna Howard Shaw Sophia Smith Ida Tarbell Wilma L. Vaught Mary Edwards Walker Annie Dodge Wauneka Eudora Welty Frances E. Willard 2001 Dorothy H. Andersen Lucille Ball Rosalynn Carter Lydia Maria Child Bessie Coleman Dorothy Day Marian de Forest Althea Gibson Beatrice A. Hicks Barbara Holdridge Harriet Williams Russell Strong Emily Howell Warner Victoria Woodhull 2002 Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis Ruth Bader Ginsburg Katharine Graham Bertha Holt Mary Engle Pennington Mercy Otis Warren 2003 Linda G. Alvarado Donna de Varona Gertrude Ederle Martha Matilda Harper Patricia Roberts Harris Stephanie L. Kwolek Dorothea Lange Mildred Robbins Leet Patsy Takemoto Mink Sacagawea Anne Sullivan Sheila E. Widnall 2005 Florence E. Allen Ruth Fulton Benedict Betty Bumpers Hillary Clinton Rita Rossi Colwell Mother Marianne Cope Maya Y. Lin Patricia A. Locke Blanche Stuart Scott Mary Burnett Talbert 2007 Eleanor K. Baum Julia Child Martha Coffin Pelham Wright Swanee Hunt Winona LaDuke Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Judith L. Pipher Catherine Filene Shouse Henrietta Szold 2009 Louise Bourgeois Mildred Cohn Karen DeCrow Susan Kelly-Dreiss Allie B. Latimer Emma Lazarus Ruth Patrick Rebecca Talbot Perkins Susan Solomon Kate Stoneman 2010–2019 2011 St. Katharine Drexel Dorothy Harrison Eustis Loretta C. Ford Abby Kelley Foster Helen Murray Free Billie Holiday Coretta Scott King Lilly Ledbetter Barbara A. Mikulski Donna E. Shalala Kathrine Switzer 2013 Betty Ford Ina May Gaskin Julie Krone Kate Millett Nancy Pelosi Mary Joseph Rogers Bernice Sandler Anna Schwartz Emma Willard 2015 Tenley Albright Nancy Brinker Martha Graham Marcia Greenberger Barbara Iglewski Jean Kilbourne Carlotta Walls LaNier Philippa Marrack Mary Harriman Rumsey Eleanor Smeal 2017 Matilda Cuomo Temple Grandin Lorraine Hansberry Victoria Jackson Sherry Lansing Clare Boothe Luce Aimee Mullins Carol Mutter Janet Rowley Alice Waters 2019 Gloria Allred Angela Davis Sarah Deer Jane Fonda Nicole Malachowski Rose O'Neill Louise Slaughter Sonia Sotomayor Laurie Spiegel Flossie Wong-Staal 2020–2029 2020 Aretha Franklin Barbara Hillary Barbara Rose Johns Henrietta Lacks Toni Morrison Mary Church Terrell 2022 Octavia E. Butler Judy Chicago Rebecca S. Halstead Mia Hamm Joy Harjo Emily Howland Katherine Johnson Indra Nooyi Michelle Obama 2024 Patricia Bath Ruby Bridges Elouise P. Cobell Kimberlé Crenshaw Peggy McIntosh Judith Plaskow Loretta Ross Sandy Stone Anna Wessels Williams Serena Williams v t e Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1901–1920 1901: Sully Prudhomme 1902: Theodor Mommsen 1903: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 1904: Frédéric Mistral / José Echegaray 1905: Henryk Sienkiewicz 1906: Giosuè Carducci 1907: Rudyard Kipling 1908: Rudolf Eucken 1909: Selma Lagerlöf 1910: Paul Heyse 1911: Maurice Maeterlinck 1912: Gerhart Hauptmann 1913: Rabindranath Tagore 1914 1915: Romain Rolland 1916: Verner von Heidenstam 1917: Karl Gjellerup / Henrik Pontoppidan 1918 1919: Carl Spitteler 1920: Knut Hamsun 1921–1940 1921: Anatole France 1922: Jacinto Benavente 1923: W. B. Yeats 1924: Władysław Reymont 1925: George Bernard Shaw 1926: Grazia Deledda 1927: Henri Bergson 1928: Sigrid Undset 1929: Thomas Mann 1930: Sinclair Lewis 1931: Erik Axel Karlfeldt (posthumously) 1932: John Galsworthy 1933: Ivan Bunin 1934: Luigi Pirandello 1935 1936: Eugene O'Neill 1937: Roger Martin du Gard 1938: Pearl S. Buck 1939: Frans Eemil Sillanpää 1940 1941–1960 1941 1942 1943 1944: Johannes V. Jensen 1945: Gabriela Mistral 1946: Hermann Hesse 1947: André Gide 1948: T. S. Eliot 1949: William Faulkner 1950: Bertrand Russell 1951: Pär Lagerkvist 1952: François Mauriac 1953: Winston Churchill 1954: Ernest Hemingway 1955: Halldór Laxness 1956: Juan Ramón Jiménez 1957: Albert Camus 1958: Boris Pasternak 1959: Salvatore Quasimodo 1960: Saint-John Perse 1961–1980 1961: Ivo Andrić 1962: John Steinbeck 1963: Giorgos Seferis 1964: Jean-Paul Sartre (declined award) 1965: Mikhail Sholokhov 1966: Shmuel Yosef Agnon / Nelly Sachs 1967: Miguel Ángel Asturias 1968: Yasunari Kawabata 1969: Samuel Beckett 1970: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1971: Pablo Neruda 1972: Heinrich Böll 1973: Patrick White 1974: Eyvind Johnson / Harry Martinson 1975: Eugenio Montale 1976: Saul Bellow 1977: Vicente Aleixandre 1978: Isaac Bashevis Singer 1979: Odysseas Elytis 1980: Czesław Miłosz 1981–2000 1981: Elias Canetti 1982: Gabriel García Márquez 1983: William Golding 1984: Jaroslav Seifert 1985: Claude Simon 1986: Wole Soyinka 1987: Joseph Brodsky 1988: Naguib Mahfouz 1989: Camilo José Cela 1990: Octavio Paz 1991: Nadine Gordimer 1992: Derek Walcott 1993: Toni Morrison 1994: Kenzaburō Ōe 1995: Seamus Heaney 1996: Wisława Szymborska 1997: Dario Fo 1998: José Saramago 1999: Günter Grass 2000: Gao Xingjian 2001–2020 2001: V. S. Naipaul 2002: Imre Kertész 2003: J. M. Coetzee 2004: Elfriede Jelinek 2005: Harold Pinter 2006: Orhan Pamuk 2007: Doris Lessing 2008: J. M. G. Le Clézio 2009: Herta Müller 2010: Mario Vargas Llosa 2011: Tomas Tranströmer 2012: Mo Yan 2013: Alice Munro 2014: Patrick Modiano 2015: Svetlana Alexievich 2016: Bob Dylan 2017: Kazuo Ishiguro 2018: Olga Tokarczuk 2019: Peter Handke 2020: Louise Glück 2021–present 2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah 2022: Annie Ernaux 2023: Jon Fosse 2024: Han Kang 2025: to be determined v t e 1993 Nobel Prize laureates Chemistry Kary B. Mullis (United States) Michael Smith (Canada) Literature (1993) Toni Morrison (United States) Peace Nelson Mandela (South Africa) Frederik Willem de Klerk (South Africa) Physics Russell Alan Hulse (United States) Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. (United States) Physiology or Medicine Richard J. Roberts (United Kingdom) Phillip A. Sharp (United States) Economic Sciences Robert Fogel (United States) Douglass North (United States) Nobel Prize recipients 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 v t e Ohio Women's Hall of Fame 1970–1979 1978 Florence E. Allen Helen Chatfield Black Frances Bolton Elizabeth Boyer Harriet Bracken Martha Kinney Cooper Gertrude Donahey Jane Edna Hunter Consolata Kline Virginia Kunkle Margaret A. Mahoney Helen Grace McClelland Agnes Merritt Rose Papier Lottie Randolph Ella P. Stewart Marigene Valiquette Ann B. Walker Stella Walsh Marion Wells 1979 Mary Jobe Akeley Mary Ann Bickerdyke Beatrice Cleveland Charity Edna Earley Eleanor Jammal Bernice Kochan Emily Leedy Ruth Lyons Jerrie Mock Emma Phaler Rachel Redinger Bobbie L. Sterne Ethel Swanbeck Clara Weisenborn Marjorie Whiteman 1980–1989 1980 Grace Berlin Erma Bombeck Patricia M. Byrne Ruth Crawford Louisa Fast Dorothy Fuldheim Lillian Gish Esther Greisheimer Edith Keller Tella Kitchen Blanche Krupansky Hattie Larlham Mary Louise Nemeth Annie Oakley Doris Martha Weber 1981 Mildred Bayer Tina Bischoff Lovin Dorothy Cornelius Doris Day Phyllis Diller Eusebia Hunkins Andre Norton Jean Starr Untermeyer Harriet Taylor Upton Nancy Wilson 1982 A. Margaret Boyd Ann Eriksson Bernice Foley Zelma Watson George Grace Goulder Izant Toni Morrison Phyllis Sewell Jayne Spain Helen Zelkowitz 1983 Harriet J. Anderson Ione Biggs Eula Bingham Mary O. Boyle Mariwyn Heath Josephine Irwin Barbara Janis Minnie Player Gloria Steinem Freda Winning Mary E. Miller Young 1984 Sally Cooper Sarah E. Harris Cindy Noble Hauserman Marcy Kaptur Karen Nussbaum Mary Rose Oakar Catherine Pinkerton Willa Beatrice Player Judith Resnik Helen Hooven Santmyer Marian Trimble Joyce Wollenberg 1985 Lois Anna Barr Cook Mercedes Cotner Zell Draz Barbara Easterling Nikki Giovanni Aurora Gonzalez Mary K. Lazarus Barbara Mandel Norma Marcere Helen Mulholland Lauretta Schimmoler Marge Schott Mary Jen Steinbrenner 1986 Margaret Andrew Kathleen L. Barber Fay Biles Elizabeth Blackwell Marie Clarke Eva Mae Crosby Ruby Dee Cynthia Drennan Hooker Glendinning Louise Herring Katherine LeVeque Ruth Ratner Miller Amelia Nava Arline Webb Pratt Anastasia Ann Przelomski Virginia Purdy Selma Lois Walker Julia Montgomery Walsh Faye Wattleton Mary Ellen Withrow 1988 Anna Biggins Patricia Clonch Norma Craden Jewel Freeman Graham Cathy Guisewite Rebecca D. Jackson Carol Heiss Jenkins Carol Kane Bea Larsen Alice Raful Lev Linda Rocker Sogg Eleanor Smeal Carolyn Utz Anita Smith Ward 1989 Jeanette Grasselli Brown Maxine Carnahan Tracy Chapman Betsy Mix Cowles Ann Gazelle Michelle Graves Florence Harshman June Hutt Geraldine Jensen Carolyn Mahoney Linda James Myers Jennie Porter Diane Poulton Renee Powell Charlene Spretnak Charlene Ventura 1990–1999 1990 Marilyn Gaston Dorothy Jackson Luella Talmadge Jackson Janet Kalven Rosabeth Kanter Maggie Kuhn Joan Lamson Maya Lin Anne Variano Macko Alicia Mott Ludel Sauvageot Fanchon bat-Lillian Shur Phebe Temperance Sutliff Grayce Williams 1991 Berenice Abbott Earladeen Badger Hallie Brown JoAnn Davidson Raquel Diaz-Sprague Rita Dove Mary Ignatia Gavin Sara J. Harper Donna Hawk June Holley Martha C. Moore Darlene Owens Helen H. Peterson Martha Pituch Yvonne Pointer Virginia Ruehlmann Josephine Schwarz Suzanne Timken Nancy Vertrone Bieniek Stella Marie Zannoni 1992 Mary of the Annunciation Beaumont Antoinette Eaton Rubie McCullough Nancy Oakley Harriet Parker Susan Porter Helen Steiner Rice Alice Schille Louella Thompson 1993 Mildred Benson Amelia Bingham Virginia Coffey Viola Famiano Colombi Ivy Gunter Virginia Hamilton Lucy Webb Hayes Joy Alice Hintz Geraldine Macelwane Anne O'Hare McCormick Rena Olshansky Edna Pincham Maxine Plummer Jean Reilly Pauline Riel 1994 Christine M. Cook Claudia Coulton Ellen Walker Craig-Jones Nanette Ferrall Jill Harms Griesse Georgia Griffith Florence Melton Lucille Nussdorfer Jane Reece Emma Ann Reynolds Carol Scott Paula Spence Deanna Tribe Lillian Wald 1995 Sandra Beckwith Daeida Hartell Wilcox Beveridge Patricia Ann Blackmon Mary Bowermaster Christine Brennan Joy Garrison Cauffman Bunny Cowan Clark Grace L. Drake Naomi J. Evans Frances Dana Gage Jane Kirkham Sylvia Lewis Tami Longaberger Donna Moon Gratia Murphy Alice Robie Resnick Muriel Siebert 1996 Carol Cartwright Elizabeth Evans Rae Natalie Prosser de Goodall Elizabeth Hauser Bernadine Healy Carol Kelly Fannie Lewis Betty Montgomery Hope Taft 1997 Carol Ball Marilyn Byers Jean Murrell Capers Martha Dorsey Joan Heidelberg Clarice Herbert Beatrice Lampkin Jacquelyn Mayer Townsend Ann O'Rourke Beryl Rothschild Thekla Shackelford 1998 Marianne Boggs Campbell Carole Garrison Nancy Hollister Stephanie J. Jones Bettye Ruth Kay Barbara Ross-Lee Audrey Mackiewicz Kathy Palasics Margaret Diane Quinn Henrietta Seiberling Mary Emily Taylor Virginia Varga Jacqueline Woods Nancy L. Zimpher 1999 Mary Jo Behrensmeyer Alvina Costilla Sarah Deal Electra Doren Daisy Flowers Annie Glenn Ann Hamilton Carole Hoover Cheryl Han Horn Carol Latham Nancy Linenkugel Marie Barrett Marsh Marjorie Parham Mary Regula Lee Lenore Rubin Harriet Beecher Stowe Jerry Sue Thornton Janet Voinovich 2000–2009 2000 Paige Palmer-Ashbaugh Maude Charles Collins Faye Dambrot Margarita De Leon Patricia Louise Fletcher Jean Patrice Harrington Shirley Hoffman Dorothy Kazel Farah Majidzadeh Ada Martin Lorle Porter Lanna Samaniego Yvonne Walker-Taylor Margaret W. Wong Betty Zane 2001 Rebecca Boreczky Frances Jennings Casement Ruth L. Davis Lucille Ford Susan F. Gray Kathleen V. Harrison Adella Prentiss Hughes Janet E. Jackson Dorothy Kamenshek Maxine Levin Irene D. Long Martha MacDonell Mary Andrew Matesich Elizabeth Powell Deborah Pryce Maria Sexton Farah Walters Georgeta Blebea Washington 2002 Judy Barker Frances Seiberling Buchholzer Joan Brown Campbell Nancy Frankenberg Zell Hart-Deming Elsie Helsel Katie T. Horstman Jennie Hwang Cathy Monroe Lewis Viola Startzman Robertson Stefanie Spielman Kathryn D. Sullivan 2003 Sheila G. Bailey Jeraldyne Kilborn Blunden Shannon K. Carter Luceille Fleming Olga González-Sanabria Elsie Janis Lois Lenski Ellen Mosley-Thompson Cathy Nelson Evlyn Gray Scott Yvonne Williams 2007 Margaret Brugler Rogers Julia Chatfield Lucille Hastings Lillie Howard Mary Ann Jorgenson Joyce "Snowfeather" Mahaney Rozella M. Schlotfeldt Katherine May Smith Florence Wang 2008 Dorothy Baunach Carrie Black Caro Bosca Yvette McGee Brown Loann Crane Joan Durgin Carol Gibbs Billie Johnson Jih-Fen Lei Elizabeth Stewart Magee Kasturi Rajadhyaksha Julie Salamon Michele G. Wheatly 2009 Gail Collins Pamela B. Davis Kim de Groh Beverly J. Gray Sharon Howard Carol Kuhre Virginia Manning Helen Moss Judith Rycus Mary Adelaide Sandusky Glenna Watson Bernett Williams Celia Williamson 2010–2019 2010 Alvarene Owens Gayle Channing Tenenbaum Dorothy Maguire Barbara Fergus Merle G. Kearns Rebecca J. Lee Nina McClelland Lana Moresky Martha Potter Otto Elizabeth Ruppert Rita Singh 2011 Cheryl A. Boyce Elizabeth H. Flick Frances Harper Brenda Hollis Mary C. Juhas Kleia R. Luckner Valerie J. Lyons Linda S. Noelker Carrie Vonderhaar v t e Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Previously the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel from 1917–1947 1918–1925 His Family by Ernest Poole (1918) The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington (1919) The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1921) Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington (1922) One of Ours by Willa Cather (1923) The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson (1924) So Big by Edna Ferber (1925) 1926–1950 Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (1926; declined) Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield (1927) The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (1928) Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin (1929) Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge (1930) Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes (1931) The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (1932) The Store by Thomas Sigismund Stribling (1933) Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Pafford Miller (1934) Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson (1935) Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis (1936) Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1937) The Late George Apley by John Phillips Marquand (1938) The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1939) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1940) In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow (1942) Dragon's Teeth by Upton Sinclair (1943) Journey in the Dark by Martin Flavin (1944) A Bell for Adano by John Hersey (1945) All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1947) Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener (1948) Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens (1949) The Way West by A. B. Guthrie Jr. (1950) 1951–1975 The Town by Conrad Richter (1951) The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk (1952) The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1953) A Fable by William Faulkner (1955) Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor (1956) A Death in the Family by James Agee (1958) The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor (1959) Advise and Consent by Allen Drury (1960) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1961) The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor (1962) The Reivers by William Faulkner (1963) The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau (1965) The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter (1966) The Fixer by Bernard Malamud (1967) The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron (1968) House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (1969) The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford (1970) Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (1972) The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty (1973) No award given (1974) The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara (1975) 1976–2000 Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow (1976) No award given (1977) Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson (1978) The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever (1979) The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer (1980) A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1981) Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike (1982) The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1983) Ironweed by William Kennedy (1984) Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie (1985) Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (1986) A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor (1987) Beloved by Toni Morrison (1988) Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (1989) The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos (1990) Rabbit at Rest by John Updike (1991) A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (1992) A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler (1993) The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx (1994) The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (1995) Independence Day by Richard Ford (1996) Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser (1997) American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1998) The Hours by Michael Cunningham (1999) Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (2000) 2001–present The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (2001) Empire Falls by Richard Russo (2002) Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2003) The Known World by Edward P. Jones (2004) Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2005) March by Geraldine Brooks (2006) The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2007) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (2008) Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (2009) Tinkers by Paul Harding (2010) A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2011) No award given (2012) The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson (2013) The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2014) All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (2015) The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016) The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2017) Less by Andrew Sean Greer (2018) The Overstory by Richard Powers (2019) The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (2020) The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich (2021) The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen (2022) Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver / Trust by Hernan Diaz (2023) Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips (2024)