Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Pulitzer Prize. She is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities, Emerita, at Princeton University. This book is derived from her Charles Eliot Norton Lectures Series at Harvard in 2016.
In her 19 years publishing with Random House, Morrison was known for her sturdy and bold support for biographies of Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Muhammad Ali. Her novels opened the eyes of millions to the black experience in all its complexity and ethical power.
In his introduction to this book, Ta-Nehisi Coates calls Morrison "one of the finest writers and thinkers this country has ever produced. Her work is rooted in history and pulls beauty from some of its most grotesque manifestations."
In The Origin of Others, Morrison examines the universal quest for belonging, the fear and obfuscation that animates the gulf between whites and blacks, and the efforts of many authors, including William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Camara Laye, to convey the clashes brought on by virulent racism.
With the creative vigor that has always been part of her identity. Morrison explores being and becoming the stranger, the color fetish, configurations of blackness, and the foreigner's home. This work could not be more timely given the widespread conversations going on in the United States about race.
