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notes Preface 1. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” Modernism: An Anthology (Malden , Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 153. 2. Hackney, Sheldon, “I Come from People Who Sang All the Time: A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” Humanities 4, no.1 (March/April 1990): 4–9, 48. Rpt. In Toni Morrison: Conversations, ed. Carolyn C. Denard (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008), 137. Chapter 1—Understanding Toni Morrison 1. I am using this term as defined by the late Columbia University literary critic Edward Said, who wrote that “the intellectual belongs on the same side with the weak and underrepresented. . . . At bottom, the intellectual . . . is neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made clichés, or the smooth, ever-so accommodating confirmation of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwilling, but actively willing to say so in public.” See Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Vantage Books, 1996), 22–23. 2. Toni Morrison, The Dancing Mind: Speech upon Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Metal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (New York: Random House, 1996). Rpt. in What Moves at the Margins, ed. Carolyn C. Denard (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 187. 3. Morrison, The Dancing Mind, 189. 4. Morrison, The Dancing Mind, 190. 5. John Duvall offers an interesting context for understanding Morrison’s acquisition of the name Toni. See John Duvall, The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). 6. Jian Ghomeshi, “Toni Morrison on Her Two Selves,” Q, CBC News (May 24, 2012). 7. Ghomeshi, “Toni Morrison.” 8. Lorain’s population in 1940, as the Depression came to an end, was 44,512. Ten years later, in 1950, postwar Lorain had increased in population by 16 percent, to 51,202, and was fueled by an economy dependent upon shipbuilding and steel. Morrison describes herself as having grown up “in a little industrial town in Ohio where everybody came for work—Mexicans, East Europeans, Greeks, and first generation 168 notes to pages 2–7 Italian—and I never lived in a black neighborhood, we were all just poor. One high school to which we all went. I didn’t know the Southern thing; I didn’t know the big city or eastern thing, so I am aware of how easy it is to share common aspirations.” See Toni Morrison: Conversations, ed. Carolyn C. Denard (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 249–50. 9. Morrison’s son Slade, with whom she coauthored nine children’s books, died in 2010 of pancreatic cancer. 10. Toni Morrison, “Lecture and Speech of Acceptance, upon the Award of the Nobel Prize for Literature,” The Nobel Lecture in Literature (New York: Knopf, 1994), 5. 11. This partial list of Morrison’s lectureships is exemplary but certainly not comprehensive . 12. See, for example, Stanley Crouch’s “Review of Beloved,” New Republic 19 (October 1987): 38–43. See also Edna O’Brien’s review of Jazz in “The Clearest Eye,” New York Times (April 5, 1992); and James Wood’s critique of Paradise in “The Color Purple,” The New Republic (March 2, 1998): 29–31. 13. Nellie Y. McKay, “An Interview with Toni Morrison,” Contemporary Literature 24 (Winter 1983): 413–29. Rpt. in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993), 407. 14. Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Doubleday, 1984), 344. 15. Morrison, “Rootedness,” 345. 16. Morrison, “Rootedness,” 345. 17. Morrison, “Rootedness,” 345. 18. Morrison, “Rootedness,” 340. 19. Thomas LeClair, “‘The Language Must Not Sweat’: A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” New Republic 184 (March 21, 1981): 26. 20. Trudier Harris, Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 11. 21. Morrison, “Rootedness,” 343. 22. Christina Davis, “Interview with Toni Morrison,” Presence Africaine (First Quarterly, 1988). Rpt. in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993), 418–19. 23. Morrison, “Rootedness,” 341. 24. Morrison, “Rootedness,” 341. 25. Terry Otten, The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison (Columbia : University of Missouri Press, 1989), 5. 26. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), 70...

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