Author Toni Morrison. (Associated Press File Photo/Alfred A. Knopf)

Author Toni Morrison. (Associated Press File Photo/Alfred A. Knopf)

On May 29, 2012, at the East Room event at the White House in Washington, DC, novelist Toni Morrison was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by US President Barack Obama. The Medal of Freedom is the highest civilian honor in the United States, awarded to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, culture, or other important public or private causes. (Photo by Alex Huang/Getty Images)

The Jury of the Film Festival (left) Chinese director Wu Yusen, French director Benova Jacques, Mexican actress Salma Hayek, Indian actress Nandita Das, American writer, Nobel Prize winner Toni · Morrison, French director Agnes Varda, Turkish-German director Fatih Akin May 21, 2005, Spanish actor Javier Baden and Sarajevo president-born director Emil Kustu Rica took a group photo at the closing ceremony of the 58th Cannes International Film Festival. After 10 days of glitz and glamour, the 58th Cannes Film Festival will present the Palme d’Or for Best Picture on May 21st. The Cannes Film Festival is the world's top film festival. It kicked off on May 11. Many senior directors lined up to compete for the prestigious Palme d'Or, while Hollywood scrambled to promote this year's blockbuster. AFP photo GERARD JULIEN (Photo source should be GERARD JULIEN/AFP/Getty Images)

Toni Morrison performed at the Lincoln Center Jazz Hurricane Relief Concert at the Jazz Rose Theater in Lincoln Center, New York City on September 17, 2005. (Photo by Brad Buckett/Getty Images)

American writer and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison received the Paris City Medal of Honor (Grand Vermeil) on November 4, 2010 at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France. (Photo by Francois Durand/Getty Images)

(From left to right) Toni Morrison and Fran Lebowitz attend the "Debt" screening at the Tribeca Hotel-Screening Room in New York City on August 22, 2011. (Photo by Andy Kropper/Getty Images)

Toni Morrison participated in the "Art and Social Activism" seminar on Broadway with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Toni Morrison and Sonia Sanchez in New York City on June 15, 2016. (Craig Barrett/Getty Images for Stella Adler Performing Arts Studio)

New York (Associated Press)-Nobel Prize winner Tony Morrison is the pioneer and ruling giant of modern literature. His imagination in "Dear," "Song of Solomon," and other works is dramatized in The pursuit of freedom within racial boundaries changed American literature. He has passed away at the age of 88.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf announced that Morrison had passed away at Montefiore Medical Center in New York on Monday night. Morrison’s family issued a statement through Knopf that she had passed away after a brief illness.

"Toni Morrison passed away peacefully last night in the company of family and friends," the family announced. "The supreme writer cherishes words. Whether it is her own, her students or other people, she reads eagerly and is the most comfortable when she writes."

Few authors have risen in such a rapid and spectacular style. When her first novel "The Bluest Eye" was published, she was almost 40 years old. By the time she was in her early 60s, she became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature by writing only six novels. In 1993, the Swedish Academy praised her for her "visionary power" and her "language itself, she wanted In-depth study of the language". Liberate "liberation" from the black and white category. In 2012, Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Obama wrote on his Facebook page on Tuesday: "Her work is not only beautiful, but also significant-it is a challenge to our conscience and a call for more empathy." "She is a good storyteller. , Just like she is on the page of a book, both charming and charming."

Morrison helped elevate multiculturalism in the United States to the world stage, and helped cancel censorship of her country’s past and unearth the unknown and unpopular life, which she called "the unfreedom at the heart of the democratic experiment." In her novels, history-black history-is a treasure trove of poetry, tragedy, love, adventure, and gossip, whether in the small Ohio town in "Sura" or the big city of Harlem in "Jazz" . She sees race as a social construction and uses language to build a better world that her character experiences. Morrison weaves everything from African literature and slave folklore, the Bible, and Gabriel García Márquez into the most diverse and harmonious literary community.

"For me, narration has never been more than just entertainment," she said in a Nobel speech. "I believe this is one of the main ways we absorb knowledge."

In 1988, she won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Beloved". She is one of the most magnificent figures in the book industry, with a gray long hair bun; her deep and keen eyes; and her warm, dramatic voice Reduce yourself to a mysterious roar or humorous falsetto. "That handsome and sensitive lady," James Baldwin called her.

Her admirers are countless-from fellow writers, college students and working people to Obama and former President Bill Clinton; Oprah Winfrey, she admired Morrison and helped her greatly expand her readership group. Morrison shared these high praises, repeatedly labeling one of her novels "Love" as "perfect", and rejected the idea that artistic achievement requires quiet acceptance.

"Maya Angelo helped me without her knowledge," Morrison told the Associated Press in a 1998 interview. "When she wrote her first book, "I Know Why Birds in Cages Sing", I was the editor of Random House. She had a lot of fun. She never said,'Who am I? My little book?

"I think... it's great to win the (Nobel) prize," Morrison added. "No one would turn it into something else. I think it’s very representative. I think it’s American. I think it’s Ohio. I feel darker than before. I feel more feminine than ever. Taste. I feel all of this, put all of these together, and have a great time out."

Morrison is the second of four children of a welder and a domestic worker. Ardelia Wofford). Her parents encouraged her to read and think, and were dissatisfied with the white children in the community. Recalling that she felt like a "nobleman", Morrison thought she was smarter and took her smarter for granted. She was a top student in high school and entered Howard University because she dreamed of spending her life among black intellectuals.

At Howard, she spent most of her free time in the theater (her laughter could easily reach the back row), and later taught there, and met and married Jamaican architect Harold Morrison. Divorced in 1964. They have two children, Harold and Slade.

But even though she continued to teach there, Howard disappointed her. Campus life seems to be closer to completing a school than a learning institution. Protesters, including former Morrison student Stockley Carmichael, demanded equality. Morrison wanted that too, but didn't know what it was like.

"I thought they were integrating for evil purposes," she said. "I think they should ask for money from those black schools. That's the problem—resources, better equipment, better teachers, collapsed buildings—not the high school next to some white kids."

In 1964, she responded to an advertisement and went to work in the textbook department of Random House. In the next 15 years, she will have an impact as a book editor, and as one of the few black women in the publishing world, this alone can ensure her legacy. She supports emerging fiction writers such as Gayl Jones and Toni Cade Bambara, helps introduce African writers such as Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka to American readers, writes Mohamed Ali’s memoirs, Angela Davis and Black Panther Huey Newton, etc. Popular books for radicals. A special project is to edit the "Black Book", which is a collection of everything from newspaper advertisements to lyrics, which indicates that she will be immersed in the daily life of the past.

By the late 1960s, she was a single mother and a committed writer, and under the impetus of her future editor Alfred A. Knopf's Robert Gottlieb, she decided whether to write or edit . Sitting at the kitchen table, she told a story based on childhood memories about a black girl in Lorraine who was raped by her father who wanted blue eyes. She called this novel "the bluest eye".

Morrison is proud of her talent for applying "Invisible Ink", making a point and leaving it to readers to discover it, such as her decision to hide the skin color of the characters in "Heaven". Her debut as a writer was at the height of the black art movement and called for literature as a political and social protest. But Morrison criticized indirectly; she was a political figure because she didn't say anything. Racism and sexism are hypothetical; she wrote about their impact, whether in "Bluest Eyes" or "Sura", which is a story about friendship and betrayal between two black women.

"The writer who influenced me the most was the novelist who wrote in Africa: Chinua Achebe,'Things Fall Apart', which is an important education for me," as a graduate student studying William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf's Mo Lison told the Associated Press in 1998.

"They take their black world for granted. No black writer (in the United States) has done this except for Jean Tumer's Sugar Cane. Everyone else has had some conflicts with whites. This is not to say that Africans No, but there is an assumption in language. Language is the world-centered language, that is, they.

"So it makes it possible for me to write the'bluest eye' without explaining anything. That's brand new! It's like stepping into a whole new world. It's an unprecedented liberation!"

She did not have an agent. Before reaching an agreement with Holt, Reinhardt, and Winston (now Henry Holt), she did not have an agent and was rejected by several publishers, which was released in 1970 Wrote this novel. Sales were not large, but her book made a deep impression on New York. The Times’ John Leonard was an early and continuing supporter of her writing, and he called it “so precise, so faithful to words, so full of pain and surprise. So that the novel has become a poetry."

Setting her story in a segregated community, where incest and suicide are no more outrageous than signs with "color only", Morrison wrote that the price of dreamers is often death, regardless of whether the mother is miserably or not. Choosing to murder her baby girl-and save it from slavery-in the "darling", or the collapsed black community in "heaven".

Like Faulkner, her role is also burdened with the legacy of slavery and separation and the continuing tragedy. For Faulkner’s southern whites and civil war losers, the price is guilt, anger, and madness; for Morrison’s slaves and their descendants, they are said to have been liberated, and history is like the most ruthless group of people.

"The future is sunset; the things of the past are left behind," Morrison wrote in "Dear", in which the ghost of the slain daughter returned to the mother who had troubled and haunted her.

"If it does not stay, then you may have to stamp it. Slave life; free life-every day is a test and a test. In a world where you are a problem even if you are a solution, there is no What can be counted on."

Morrison's breakthrough came from "Solomon's Song" in 1977, which is her third novel that tells the story of the sexual, social and ancestral education of young milkers. This is the first work of a black author after Richard Wright's "Native Son" was selected for the Book of the Month and won the National Book Critics Association Award. This is also Morrison's first book centered on male characters. This novel allows her to "go out of the house and domesticate the landscape."

But the mainstream is another kind of education. When commenting on "Solomon's Song," the author Reynolds Price accused Morrison of "the omission of active white characters is understandable, but weak." (He later withdrew it.) When "The Beloved" was ignored to win the National Book Award, the New York Times Book Review published a letter of protest from 48 black writers, including Angelou and Amiri Baraka, noting that Morrison had been Has not won a major literary award.

"The Beloved" continued to win the Pulitzer Prize, Morrison soon reached the top of the literary world, won the Nobel Prize, and served as the unofficial winner of the Winfrey Book Club, which was established in 1996 . Winfrey chose "Solomon's Song", "Bluest" Eye", "Paradise" and "Sula" for many years and listed all Morrison's works as her favorites. Winfrey also starred in and helped produce The 1998 movie version of "Dear".

Like many other winners, Morrison's post-Nobel novels are not as popular as her earlier works. Morrison did not win any major competition awards after winning the Nobel Prize, and was criticized for the clumsy plot and pretentious language in "Love" and "Heaven". However, the novel "Compassion" published in 2008 was highly praised. "Home" is a short story about a young Korean War veteran. It was published in 2012, and a contemporary drama "God Bless the Child" was released three years later. Morrison himself is the subject of a critically acclaimed documentary "Tony Morrison: The Fragment I Am" released this year.

Morrison’s other works include a collection of essays "Playing in the Dark"; "Dreaming about Emmet", a play about the murdered teenager Emmet Till; and with her son Slade Mo Several children's books co-authored by Lisson (who died of cancer in 2010). In November 2016, she wrote a highly cited New York essay about the election of Donald Trump, calling his ascension to the presidency a mark of what whites would settle for to hold on to their status.

"The consequences of the collapse of white privileges are so terrible that many Americans flock to a political platform that supports and transforms violence against the unarmed into strength. These people are not so angry, they are scared, the kind of kneeling The trembling horror," she wrote.

"William Faulkner knows this better than almost any other American writer. In "Absalom, Absalom", incest is not so much taboo for upper-class families in the South as it is to admit that a drop will obviously tarnish family descent. The black blood. Instead of losing its "whiteness" (again), this family chose to murder."

She taught at Princeton University for many years and retired in 2006, but has an apartment in downtown Manhattan and a riverside house in Rockland County, New York. The house was burned down in 1993, destroying manuscripts, Faulkner and other writers. The first edition and countless family memorabilia. She rebuilt the house and continued to live and work there.

"When I am not thinking about a novel, or when I am not really writing about it, it is not very good; the 21st century is not a very good place. I need it (writing) to maintain emotional stability," she told Mei in 2012 Associated Press.

"When I finished "The Bluest Eye"... I was not happy. I remember I was sad. Then I thought,'Oh, you know, everyone is talking about "sisterhood" and I want to write about female friends The real face. (The source of inspiration for "Sura"). Suddenly, the whole world has become a truly interesting place. Everything in it is something I can use or discard. It has a shape. The problem is— This is how I live here."

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