Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 8, 1993 TAG: 9310080007
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J. LENGTH: Medium
"Winning as an American is very special - but winning as a black American is a knockout," Morrison, 62, said at her office at Princeton University, where she has taught since 1989.
In awarding the 1993 prize Thursday, the Swedish Academy called Morrison "a literary artist of the first rank" whose work is "unusually finely wrought and cohesive, yet at the same time rich in variation."
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. It was into that area that I stepped and found it to be enormous," she said.
The author of six novels, Morrison won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for "Beloved." Her first work of fiction, "The Bluest Eye," came out in 1970, followed by "Sula" in 1974, "Song of Solomon" in 1977, "Tar Baby" in 1981, "Beloved" in 1987 and "Jazz" in 1992.
"I think she's a wonderful stylist and a terrific thinker," said author Jane Smiley, who won the Pulitzer Prize for the 1991 novel "A Thousand Acres."
Morrison also lectures on black literature, wrote a play, "Dreaming Emmett," and a book of criticism, "Playing in the Dark - Whiteness and the Literary Imagination." She conceived, edited and contributed to a 1992 collection of essays on Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas.
Since 1981, she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
"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," Morrison said.
Morrison said she was glad her mother, Ella Wofford, 87, is alive to share her joy, particularly because four other relatives died this year.
Morrison said she was flabbergasted to learn she was the first American-born winner since John Steinbeck in 1962.
"If I can claim to be representative of a number of regions and groups, it's all to the good," she said. "It distributes the honor in such a way that you feel more blessed."
Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in the steel mill town of Lorain, Ohio, the second of four children of Alabama sharecroppers who had migrated north. 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.
A senior editor at Random House for nearly 20 years, she became a professor at Princeton in 1989.
Morrison is the eighth woman to win the literature prize since it was first awarded in 1901. The last woman to win was Nadine Gordimer of South Africa, in 1991; the most recent American winner was the Soviet-born poet Joseph Brodsky in 1987.
by CNB