Her commendation celebrated her novels, “characterized by visionary force and poetic import,” and celebrated her ability to “give life to an essential aspect of American reality.” In 1996, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a prestigious lifetime achievement honor bestowed upon other such luminaries as John Updike, Stephen King, and Isabel Allende.
In 1993, Morrison became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In 1983, Morrison left book publishing to write novels and teach at both Rutgers University and the State University of New York. In 1973, Sula was nominated for the National Book Award a few years later, in 1977, Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it became the first novel by a black writer selected for the Book of the Month Club since Richard Wright’s Native Son was chosen in 1940. In the years to follow, Morrison published prolifically, and her work garnered a number of prestigious honors. Set in her hometown of Lorain, Ohio, the groundbreaking novel explores the insidious evils of internalized racism. Those mornings produced The Bluest Eye, her first novel, which was published in 1970. Throughout her early years as an editor, Morrison, who was raising two children as a single mother after the dissolution of her marriage, rose every morning at 4 a.m. She championed a new generation of African American authors, including Gayl Jones and Angela Davis, and published the celebrated autobiography of Muhammad Ali. Among the first books she worked on was Contemporary African Literature, published in 1972, an anthology that brought Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Athol Fugard to American audiences. Two years later, she became Random House’s first black female senior editor in the fiction division.
In 1965, Morrison began working as an editor at the textbook division of Random House. Before she became a writer in her own right, Morrison was a book editor who remodeled the literary establishment, transforming what was possible for black writers in midcentury America.
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