"I felt shockwaves ripple when I first heard of Aunty’s death. She paved the way as an editor,writer,teacher and visionary for black writers and other writers of colour,"Van Neervan said."This capacity-building resonates with me. Literature was forever changed from her contribution."
While raising two children alone,Morrison would get up at 4am to write her first novel,The Bluest Eye,which focused on the feelings of black female children who were taught to regard themselves as ugly. It was published in 1970,when she was 39.
It's confronting topics of racism,incest,and child molestation drew some attempts to strike the book from school curricula and library shelves.
Morrison's seminal works of literature on the black experience includeSong of Solomon and the post Civil War novel,Beloved,a blending of magic realism and gritty reality which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Kind of moral and emotional intensity that few writers ever attempt.
Barack Obama
Her position as a voice for minorities was recognised in 1993 when she became the first African-American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and in 2012 former US president Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom,saying at the ceremony that her prose brought a"kind of moral and emotional intensity that few writers ever attempt".
Sonny Mehta,publisher and editor-in-chief of Alfred A Knopf,which publishedSula in 1973 and nine of her other novels,said Morrison had spent her working life in the service of literature:writing,reading,editing and teaching books.