Clinton among guests at party for Morrison

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), May 28, 2006

A party for author Toni Morrison drew personalities including former President Bill Clinton and actor Morgan Freeman as well as officials and students from Princeton University, where she taught for 17 years before announcing her retirement this spring.

Morrison, 75, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her 1987 book "Beloved," which told the story of a former slave haunted by the ghost of her murdered child, began her career at Princeton in 1989.

During the Friday ceremony in New York, which was planned before her announcement but at times felt like a retirement party, Morrison was honored and praised for her literary contributions. Morrison, an Ohio native who was born Chloe Anthony Wofford, began writing in 1970.