ABSTRACT
On 17 December 1993, members of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm awarded Toni Morrison the prestigious Nobel Prize for literature. For more than twenty years, Morrison has been a significant figure in the national life of American letters. She has published six novels, including her most recent, Jazz. It has been noted that Morrison’s six novels have established her as one of the ‘few novelists whose work is both popular and critically acclaimed’ (Schappell, 1993:83). Indeed, Morrison’s example as a writer and mentor has inspired a younger generation, a literary movement, of formidable black women writers. Her path-breaking editorship at Random House (1965-77) helped to push forward the publication of new voices and imaginative visions. Moreover, she generated a large new public readership, linked by race and gender, eager for a deeper examination and fuller understanding of race and gender in shared human experience. It should not be surprising, then, that in conferring the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy rightly acknowledged Morrison as a writer ‘who, in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality’ (Morrison, 1994:6). Morrison’s work is particularly crucial because it brings together ‘literature’ and public culture in a politically conscious relationship.
