Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of February 18th.
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It is the 49th day of the year, leaving 316 days remaining in 2022.
Her life was all about story telling. It was in the culture of her family. It was in her education at Howard and Cornell universities. It was in her teaching in colleges and universities, including Texas Southern, Howard, and later at Princeton. It was in her first job as a fiction editor at Random House.
At Random House, Morrison cultivated and mentored Black writers from Africa and the United States, such as the novelist Toni Cade Bambara, Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, South African playwright Athol Fugard, and American activists and writers Angela Davis and Huey Newton.
By 1970, she was writing and publishing her own fiction. Her debut novel, The Bluest Eye, told the story of a young Black girl, a victim of abuse, who wishes she had blue eyes because she is preoccupied with the standards of white beauty. In 1987, Morrison wrote perhaps her best and most famous novel, Beloved, a tale about an enslaved woman who kills her infant daughter rather than subject her to a life in slavery.
The book won the Pulitzer prize. Morrison also won a PEN award, the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
She continued to write novels about the consequences of racism on Black people in the United States, including Jazz, Paradise, Love, and Mercy, Her books detailed the Black experience both during the time they were enslaved, and afterward as they struggled to obtain equal rights.
Morrison died in 2019 in the Bronx.
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