This Week in Literary History: Toni Morrison Becomes the First Black American to Win the Nobel Prize for Literature

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Toni Morrison becomes the first Black American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

On October 7, 1993, Toni Morrison, née Chloe Ardelia Wofford, became the first—and as of now, the only—Black American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. (She is the country’s third most recent winner, after Louise Glück, who won last year, and . . . Bob Dylan.) 

In retrospect, of course, she’s a shoo-in. Morrison is universally recognized as one of the greatest American writers in modern history. In 2016, Beloved, first published in 1987, was an international sensation and voted the best work of American fiction of the previous 25 years; it is not controversial to suggest that nothing has been published in the last five years to challenge its crown. Her work has influenced, changed, and inspired both readers—like Kamala Harris and Barack Obama—and writers—from Ocean Vuong to Keah Brown to Rich Benjamin. After Morrison’s death in 2019, the literary world overflowed with tributes of all kinds—visual, literary, and physical. It’s hard to think of a more influential writer working in the modern era, or any American who deserved a Nobel more. 

Of course, Morrison was more than just a great novelist—she was a moral and intellectual giant, whose perspectives on language and writing and race were as important as her works themselves. “The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, midwifery properties for menace and subjugation,” Morrison explained in her Nobel lecture. “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek—it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language—all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.”

Whew.

SPONSORED BY NARRATIVE MAGAZINE

Please join us in celebrating Morgan Talty and Tryphena L. Yeboah for their remarkable talent and singular voices. Talty and Yeboah take their places in the richly talented lineage of Narrative Prize winners who’ve gone on to expand and deepen our understanding of story—past, present, and future. Read more about this year's winners.

ESSENTIAL WISDOM FOR WRITERS

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

In other (old)

news this week

Revenge king Edgar Allan Poe is found delirious in a Baltimore gutter under mysterious circumstances; it’s the last time anyone will ever see him before his death—after which they will see him a lot (October 3, 1849) • Extremely British satirist Anthony Trollope tenders his resignation from his senior administrative position in the British General Post Office in order to write full-time (October 3, 1867) • A California Superior Court judge rules that Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” is of “redeeming social importance” (maybe even one of the most iconic poems in the English language?) and thus not obscene (October 3, 1957) • Don DeLillo’s Underworld is published (October 3, 1997) • The first issue of Esquire is published, with stories by Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Dashiell Hammett (October 4, 1933) • Model, poet, and artist Elizabeth Siddal is exhumed at Highgate Cemetery in London in order to recover the manuscript of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems buried with her (October 5, 1869) • Thousands attend the funeral of French novelist Emile Zola at the Cimetiere de Montmartre in Paris (October 5, 1902) • Allen Ginsberg reads from “Howl” for the first time at Six Gallery (October 7, 1955) • Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree is published (October 7, 1964)

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THE PUNCTUATION MARKS LOVED (AND HATED) BY FAMOUS WRITERS

“Everybody [writes about their childhood]. You can’t help it, I suppose. You are fearfully observant then. You notice all kinds of things, but there’s no way of putting them all together. My memories of some of those days are so much clearer than things that happened in 1950, say. I don’t think one should make a cult of writing about childhood, however. I’ve always tried to avoid it. I find I have written some, I must say.”

–ELIZABETH BISHOP

Died this week in 1979

“The thing we must do intensely is be human together. People are more important than things. We must get together. The best thing humans can have going for them is each other. We have each other. We must reject everything which humiliates us. Humans are not objects of consumption. We must develop an absolute priority of humans ahead of profit—any humans ahead of any profit. Then we will survive. … Together.”

–FRANK HERBERT

Born this week in 1920

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