The 250th Anniversary of Princeton University
Convocation Speaker
TONI MORRISON
Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities
Toni Morrison, the 1993 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was appointed Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University in 1989. She is the author of six major novels, a collection of essays and dozens of articles and reviews. This year, she was named the Jefferson Lecturer by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the highest honor given by the United States for achievement in the humanities.
Morrison received a bachelor's degree in English from Howard University in 1953 and a master's degree in American literature from Cornell University in 1955. She has held teaching posts at Yale, Bard College and Rutgers University. The New York State Board of Regents appointed her to the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at the State University at Albany in 1984, a post she held until 1989. In 1988, she was the Obert C. Tanner Lecturer at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, and the Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Professor at Syracuse University. In 1990 she delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Massey Lectures at Harvard University. In 1994 she was the International Cordorcet Chair at the Ecole Normale Superieure and College de France.
Her novels, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz, have received extensive critical acclaim. She received the National Book Critics Award in 1977 for Song of Solomon and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Beloved. Both novels were chosen as the main selections for the Book of the Month Club, in 1977 and 1987, respectively. Her books of essays include Playing in the Dark, and her edited collection, Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Construction of Social Reality.
Morrison wrote the lyrics for "Honey and Rue," which was commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Kathleen Battle, with music by Andre Previn, and premiered in January 1992. Her lyrics for "Four Songs," with music by Previn, was premiered by Sylvia McNair at Carnegie Hall in November 1994.
She has received honorary degrees from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Sarah Lawrence, Oberlin, Dartmouth, Yale, Georgetown, Columbia, Brown, the University of Michigan, and Universite Paris 7-Denis Diderot. The first recipient of the Washington College Literary Award in 1987, she was also a New York State Governor's Arts Awardee in 1986.
Other prestigious awards include: Rhegium Julii Prize for Literature, 1994; the Condorcet Medal, Paris, 1994; Pearl Buck Award, 1994; Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, Paris, 1993; the Modern Language Association of America Commonwealth Award in Literature, 1989; Sara Lee Corporation Frontrunner Award in Arts, 1989; Anisfield Wolf Book Award in Race Relations, 1988; the Cleveland Prize in Literature, 1978; and the Distinguished Writer Award of 1978 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
A senior editor at Random House for 20 years, Morrison was a founding member of the Academie Universelle Des Culture, a Trustee of the New York Public Library, a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the International Parliament of Writers and the Author's Guild where she served on the Guild Council and as foundation treasurer. She served on the National Council of the Arts for six years, and is a member of Africa Watch and Helsinki Watch Committees on Human Rights.
She was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, a steel-mill town just west of Cleveland. She now resides in Princeton, N.J., and has two grown sons.