Morrison’s views on Israel were seen as especially painful because she was an iconoclastic figure who had challenged so many conventions about race and oppression. Morrison’s work illuminated the experience of African-Americans and she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993. The Swedish Academy praised her “visionary force” and her command of “language itself, a language she wants to liberate” from racial concepts.Born in Ohio, she studied at Howard University and got a master’s degree in literature from Cornell, then became an editor at Random House. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published when she was nearly 40.Beloved, her 1987 novel about a female slave who kills her own baby to save her from slavery, is her best-known work. In 1988, it won the Pulitzer Prize, as well as many other awards. It was adapted into a film produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey.Her other works include Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby and the other two novels in the Beloved trilogy, Jazz and Paradise.In 2012, US president Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. For many years, she was a professor at Princeton University.In 2015, when she was asked to write the introduction to a collection of the complete works of Primo Levi – an Italian Jewish writer and chemist who wrote extensively of his experiences in the Holocaust – the choice generated some controversy.
Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize winning author and critic of Israel, dead at 88
Morrison’s views on Israel were seen as painful because she was an iconoclastic figure who had challenged conventions about race and oppression.
