Nobel Prize in literature a 'knockout' for Morrison, 1st black award recipient - Toni Morrison

"Winning as an American is very special-but winning as a Black American is a knockout," said novelist-essayist Toni Morrison when she recently became the first Black writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

Morrison, 62, whose works include The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved, will receive the $825,000 prize during ceremonies on Dec. 10. She was cited by the Swedish Academy for writing prose "with the luster of poetry."

Her lyrical accounts of the Black experience make her a "literary artist of the first rank" whose work is "unusually finely wrought and cohesive, yet at the same time rich in variation," the academy stated.

At her office at Princeton (N.J.) University where she has been a professor of humanities since 1989, Morrison said, "I am unendurably happy." She noted, "Whatever you think about prizes and the irrelevance to one's actual work, there is a very distinct tremor when you win a prize like the Nobel Prize."

Flabbergasted to learn she was the first American-born winner since John Steinbeck in 1962, Morrison said, "If I can claim to be representative of a number of regions and groups, it's all to the good. It distributes the honor in such a way that you feel more blessed." Morrison said she was especially happy that her mother, Ella Wofford, 87, is alive to share her joy.

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in the steel mill town of Lorain, Ohio, Morrison was the second of four children of Alabama sharecroppers. She studied humanities at Howard University and earned a master's degree in American literature from Cornell University in 1955. She is divorced and has two sons.

She made her debut as a novelist in 1970 with The Bluest Eye and soon gained attention for her "epic power, unerring ear for dialogue and richly expressive depictions of Black America," the Academy said.

That work was followed by the novels Sula (1974), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), which earned her a 1988 Pulitzer Prize and Jazz (1992). Morrison said she was inspired by "huge silences in literature, things that had never been articulated, printed or imagined and they were the silences about Black girls, Black women." She added, "It was into that area that I stepped and found it to be enormous."

In her 1992 book of essays, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, she wrote, "My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world. My project rises from delight, not from disappointment."

Morrison's Nobel Prize win brings to eight the number of Blacks from different fields who have won the coveted honor since it was established. Ralph J. Bunche won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to bring peace in the Middle East between Palestinians and Jews while serving as a United Nations mediator in Palestine in 1948 and 1949.

Other Black winners of the Nobel Peace Prize are Albert John Luthuli, who won in 1960, for his peaceful campaign against apartheid in South Africa; Martin Luther King Jr., 1964 recipient for leading the struggle for equality for Blacks in the U.S. through nonviolent protests; and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 winner who spearheaded peaceful resistance to institutionalized racism in South Africa.

The Nobel Prize in economics went to the St. Lucian-born Sir Arthur Lewis in 1979. He was cited for his research into the economic problems of developing countries. The other two Nobel Prizes in literature went to Nigeria native Wole Soyinka in 1986 and Derek Walcott, of St. Lucia, in 1992, for their respective plays, poems and novels.