Word: morrisons
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...many years, though, her writing was confined to the off-hours when she was not being a mother or a breadwinner. After her 1964 divorce and resignation from Howard, Morrison and her children moved to Syracuse, New York, where she edited textbooks at a subsidiary of Random House. Three years later she was transferred to the publisher's Manhattan headquarters...
...almost any measure except her own, Morrison moved easily and successfully through the overwhelmingly white provinces of publishing and academe. At the same time, while working to improve other people's manuscripts, she had territories of her own in mind. Where in contemporary American literature were the black girls and women she had known and been? Where were the fictional counterparts of her relatives back in Lorain, portrayed in all their loving, feuding, straitened complexity...
...artful answers to these questions. Sula (1973) examines the stormy friendship of two black women and the opposing imperatives to obey or to rebel against the mores of their beleaguered community. Song of Solomon (1977), her only novel with a male protagonist, proved a critical and commercial breakthrough for Morrison; the phantasmagoric saga of a black man in mystical pursuit of his past won the author rapturous praise and a greatly enlarged circle of readers...
Those who do not find Song of Solomon Morrison's best book almost invariably choose Beloved (1987), an intricate, layered, harrowing story about what an escaped slave did to save her child from bondage and the rippling effects of this act through many years and lives. In 1988, after Beloved had been passed over by judges for the National Book Awards and the National Book Critics Circle, a group of 48 black authors signed and sent a letter to the New York Times Book Review complaining that Morrison had never won an NBA or a Pulitzer Prize. The gesture...
...such reservations should attend Morrison's Nobel. The Swedish Academy sometimes works in mysterious ways, but it cannot be lobbied. It made an honorable, correct choice in Morrison, but probably for at least one wrong reason. In the statement explaining Morrison's selection, the academy wrote, in part, "She delves into the language itself, a language she wants to liberate from the fetters of race." This is wrong, as have been the many critics over the years who have praised Morrison for "transcending" the ( blackness of her characters and bestowing on them an abstract universality that everyone can understand...