In January 1988, having worked her way up in the literary hierarchy, Morrison received the Ritz-Hemingway, National Book, and National Book Critics Circle nominations for Beloved — but no awards. Led by poet June Jordan, a formal protest that white critics were unwilling to recognize Morrison's enormous talent ran in major newspapers, accompanied by an open letter from Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Henry Louis Gates, Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, Angela Davis, and forty-two other African Americans. Critic Houston A. Baker labeled the letter a "civil action" designed to call attention to a "miscarriage of judgment": "We wanted to call the attention of others to this ignoring of the beauty and greatness of Morrison."
Morrison was stunned by the deluge of support from her peers. On March 31, she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Beloved, which had been on the bestseller list only eighteen weeks prior to the award. That same cataclysmic year, a list of awards came tumbling after. Fourteen honorary degrees poured in from mostly East Coast institutions, and Morrison was named Tanner Lecturer at the University of Michigan. The attractive, regal, literary matriarch accepted her windfall, winning audiences with her 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 F. Goheen Professorship in creative writing, women's studies, and African studies at Princeton, becoming the first black female to be so honored by an Ivy League university.
After receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, Morrison's crowning achievement, she has been besieged by a host of speaking engagements and has been granted honorary memberships in the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, New York Public Library, Helsinki Watch Committee, and advisory council of New York's Queens' College. Despite these new demands, she still struggles to make time for writing as she nurtures new black voices, but she has become an expert at finding privacy and sufficient solitude in order to write. As her father taught her in childhood, she still remains dubious of white society: "I teach my children that there is a part of yourself that you keep from white people — always."
