A Celebration of the Arts and Sciences - Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison (Robert F. Goheen Professor Emerita in the Humanities, Princeton University) accepts the 2016 Emerson-Thoreau Medal via video and gives a reading from "Beloved."
Toni Morrison was awarded the 2016 Emerson-Thoreau Medal for her distinguished achievement in the field of literature. This award was presented to Professor Morrison, a member of the American Academy, on April 6, 2017, at the House of the Academy in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Established in 1958, the medal is awarded to an individual for his or her total literary achievement rather than for a specific work.
Previous recipients of the Emerson-Thoreau Medal include: Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Katherine Anne Porter, Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth.
“Toni Morrison is an overwhelming figure in American and world literature,” wrote one of her nominators for this prize. “Her novels are already standard texts in high schools (The Bluest Eye) and colleges (Beloved). Playing in the Dark, her work of literary criticism, has been hugely influential in the field of American literary history. We simply do not read our classical American writers, from Poe to Cather to Hemingway, the same way after this seminal book on the ‘Africanist’ presence in our canonical works.”