Word: morrison
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...recipient of this honor, Bailyn joins intellectual luminaries such as Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman and Toni Morrison, all of whom were chosen to deliver past Jefferson Lectures in the Humanities
...Morrison naturally welcomes the commercial windfalls such recognition brings, but she is not terribly comfortable with being recognized in that way. She faces her upcoming publicity tour for Paradise with a certain dread, although she feels she owes the effort to her publisher, which has a large investment in the novel. "I get cranky and depressed on the road," she says. As a Nobel laureate, she has a little more cachet than struggling first novelists, so she has been able to set certain limits on how she is displayed. "I've refused to do the morning TV shows. I just...
Even without the upcoming tour, Morrison's life seems hectic. She rents an apartment near Princeton University in New Jersey, where since 1989 she has held a university chair in the humanities; another apartment in lower Manhattan; and a stone house in Rockland County, N.Y. Plus, she is having rebuilt the house she owned on the Hudson River just north of New York City, which burned to the ground on Christmas Day 1993. Three residences? Or four, counting the house in progress? "I was a child of the Depression," she shrugs and laughs. "I have bad dreams about eviction...
...want to give up the delight of not having to answer to another person, and I was worried about how my two boys would react to a stepfather." Those sons are in their 30s, one an architect and the other a painter and musician; one of them produced Morrison's first grandchild...
Although her professional responsibilities--to Princeton, her publisher, her public--are heavy, Morrison insists that "my personal life is most unexciting, and I like it like that." She sees a small group of friends occasionally and reads all the time. "Reading is splendid." She also gardens at the house in the country, "pot gardening, now mostly flowers. There have been mornings when I've gone into my greenhouse at sunrise, and the next time I checked it was noon...