The Nobel Prize in Literature and Morrison’s Trilogy

Abstract

Morrison survived the year 1992 with its three books ( Jazz, Race-ing Justice, and Playing in the Dark) but it was difficult. She got very little new writing done. In fact, since Beloved had won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Morrison had been on the reading and lecturing circuit — and she had also been the recipient of important literary prizes in addition to the Pulitzer. In 1990, for instance, she was asked to deliver the first Chazen Lecture at the University of Wisconsin, the Charter Lecture at the University of Georgia, and the Clark Lectures at Trinity College in Cambridge. That same year she received the Chubb Fellowship at Yale University, and the Chianti Ruffino Antico Fattore International Literary Prize. Perhaps it should have come as no surprise, then, that in 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature — the first United States African American writer to be so honored, and the first United States woman to be a recipient since Pearl Buck had received the award many decades earlier.