Toni

I’ll read anything by Hilton Als, and this 2003 profile of Toni Morrison is why.

“‘I know it seems like a lot,’ Morrison said. ‘But I really only do one thing. I read books. I teach books. I write books. I think about books. It’s one job.’ What Morrison has managed to do with that job—and the criticism, pro and con, she has received for doing it—has made her one of the most widely written-about American authors of the past fifty years. (The latest study of her work, she told me, is a comparison of the vernacular in her novels and William Faulkner’s. ‘'I don’t believe it,’ I said. ‘Believe it,’ she said, emphatically.) Morrison—required reading in high schools across the country—is almost always treated as a spokeswoman for her gender and her race. In a review of “Paradise,” Patricia Storace wrote, ‘Toni Morrison is relighting the angles from which we view American history, changing the very color of its shadows, showing whites what they look like in black mirrors. To read her work is to witness something unprecedented, an invitation to a literature to become what it has claimed to be, a truly American literature.’ It’s a claim that her detractors would also make, to opposite effect.”

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