With her commencement speech, Toni Morrison charged the Wellesley College class of 2004 to “go out and save the world.”
“I am a teller of stories and therefore an optimist, a believer in the ethical bend of the human heart, a believer in the mind’s disgust with fraud and its appetite for truth, a believer in the ferocity of beauty,” the award-winning author continued. “So, from my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as already artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.”
Morrison earned an English degree from Howard University, followed by a master’s from Cornell University. She’d go on to teach at Howard, Texas Southern University, Yale, and Princeton before entering the publishing world as an editor at Random House.
It wasn’t until she was 39 that Morrison hit the scene as an author, releasing her first book, “The Bluest Eye.” She’d go on to write 11 novels that explored the Black experience in America, including “Beloved,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988. More accolades were to come Morrison’s way. In 1993, she became the first African American woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature. Then, in 2012, Barack Obama honored her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But perhaps her most apt honor came in 2000 when the Library of Congress recognized Morrison as a Living Legend.
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