Toni Morrison: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

by MELVILLE HOUSE (Editor), Nikki Giovanni (Introduction)

Overview

“Knowledge is what’s important, you know?  Not the erasure, but the confrontation of it.” — TONI MORRISON
 
In this wide-ranging collection of thought-provoking interviews — including her first and last — Toni Morrison (whom President Barrack Obama called a “national treasure”) details not only her writing life, but also her other careers as a teacher, and as a publisher, as well as the gripping story of her family. In fact, Morrison reveals here that her Nobel Prize-winning novels, such as Beloved and Song of Solomon, were born out of her family’s stories — such as those of her great-grandmother, born a slave, or her father, escaping the lynch mobs of the South. With an introduction by her close friend, poet Nikki Giovani, Morrison hereby weaves yet another fascinating and inspiring narrative — that of herself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781612198736
Publisher:	Melville House Publishing
Publication date:	07/07/2020
Series:	Last Interview Series
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	506,071
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931. After graduating from Howard University, and getting a masters at Cornell University, she became an English professor at Texas Southern University. When her marriage to Harold Morrison broke up in 1964, leaving her with their two sons, she got a job at Random House as the company's first African-American editor. She would work with many notable authors, including Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, and Toni Cade Bambara. In 1970 Morrison published her own first novel, The Bluest Eye, which was extremely well-received. Her third novel, Song of Solomon, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She would go on to write several more novels—perhaps most notably, Beloved—as well as plays and poetry, and was awarded the Noble Prize in Literature IN 1993. She died in 2019.

Poet and activist Nikki Giovanni first came to fame as one of the founders of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s. The author of numerous books of poetry as well as several children's books, she has won numerous awards, including a Grammy nomination for a POETRY record. One of Oprah Winfrey's 25 "Living Legends," Giovanni is University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech.

Table of Contents

Introduction Nikki Giovanni vii

The First Interview: Editor's Personal Commitment Shapes a Scrapbook of Black History 3

By Lila Freilicher

Publishers Weekly

December, 1973

Interview with Toni Morrison 9

Interview with Donald M. Suggs, Jr.

River Styx

1986

Toni Morrison on Capturing a Mother's 'Compulsion' to Nurture in Beloved 21

Interview with Charlayne Hunter-Gault

PBS NewsHour

1987

Toni Morrison on Love and Writing, and Dealing with Race in Literature 29

Interview with Bill Moyers

PBS TV

March 11, 1990

The Salon Interview: Toni Morrison 63

Interview with Zia Jaffrey

Salon

February 3, 1998

National Visionary Leadership Project 93

Video interview with Camille O. Cosby

November 5, 2004

Toni Morrison's Haunting Resonance 99

Interview with Christopher Bollen

Interview Magazine

March, 2012

The Last Interview 123

Interview with Alain Elkann

AlainElkannInterviews.com

October 14, 2018

Editorial Reviews

Her writing was a beautiful, meaningful challenge to our conscience and our moral imagination.” —Barack Obama
 
"She was our conscience. Our seer. Our truth-teller. She was a magician with language, who understood the Power of words. She used them to roil us, to wake us, to educate us and help us grapple with our deepest wounds and try to comprehend them." —Oprah Winfrey
 
“Morrison’s characters live with me the way that biblical figures were always in the back of my grandmother’s mind when she needed to make a point.” —Tayari Jones

“She wrote about what was difficult and what was necessary and in doing so she unearthed for a generation of people a kind of redemption, a kind of relief.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  

“Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours …” —Margaret Atwood

From the Publisher