In 1993, Toni Morrison became the first African-American writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. The prestigious honor, which marks the crowning achievement of Morrison's literary career, was another in a series of "firsts" in her distinguished career. In 1977, Morrison's third novel, Song of Solomon, was chosen as a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, which had not selected a novel written by a black author since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940. And in 1981, Morrison became the first African-American woman since Zora Neale Hurston in 1943 to appear on the cover of Time magazine.
Morrison has held teaching posts at Yale, Bard College, and Rutgers, among others. She held the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at the State University of New York for six years. In 1990, she delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Massey Lectures at Harvard. In addition to receiving honorary degrees from many prestigious institutions, including Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Sarah Lawrence, and Brown, she is the recipient of numerous awards: She was named Distinguished Writer of 1978 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 1980, she was appointed to the National Council on the Arts by former President Carter; the following year, in 1981, she was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Writer's Guild, and the Author's League. In 1988, she was named as a member of the Helsinki Watch Committee and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her fourth novel, Beloved. And in 1989, she won the Modern Language Association of America's Commonwealth Award in Literature. That same year, she accepted the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities Council at Princeton University, where she holds a joint appointment in African studies, creative writing, and women's studies.
