Morrison was stunned by the support of her peers. On March 31, 1988, she won a Pulitzer Prize for Beloved, which had enjoyed an 18-week run on the bestseller list. That same cataclysmic year, a list of awards came tumbling after: the Melcher Book Award, Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, and the City of New York Mayor's Award of Honor for Art and Culture. From New York University came the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award in Arts and Letters, marked by a medal and $2,000. Fourteen honorary degrees poured in from mostly east coast institutions, notably Oberlin, Dartmouth, Bryn Mawr, Columbia, and Yale. Morrison was named Tanner Lecturer at the University of Michigan.
The literary matriarch accepted her windfall, winning audiences with soft-spoken grace and a private, understated sense of self. "It was fabulous," she said. "I loved it. I felt crowned."
In fall 1989, Morrison left her Albany home to accept the Robert Goheen Professorship in creative writing, women's studies, and African studies at Princeton, becoming the first black female to be so honored by the Ivy League. That same year she received the MLA Commonwealth Award, and the following year brought the Chianti Ruffino Antico Fattore International Literary Prize.
In 1993, Morrison became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. The Nobel Foundation stated that Morrison "gives life to an essential aspect of American reality" through "novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import."
