Sophie Gee

We're halfway through our special series on the great American writer, Toni Morrison, the writer who many readers worldwide think of perhaps as the very greatest African-American writer.

And today I have a special conversation with a colleague of mine at Princeton, a friend and someone whose work I hugely admire.

This is Professor Autumn Womack.

She is one of the leading Toni Morrison scholars in the world today.

And in 2023, Autumn led a curatorial team for an incredible archival exhibition at Princeton.

It was called Tony Morrison Sites of Memory, and it used never-before-seen archival objects from the Tony Morrison papers at Princeton University to shed new light on the way that Tony Morrison worked as an artist, a writer, and a major modern thinker about American culture and African-American identity.

In the aftermath of this project, Autumn started a new book, a biography of Toni Morrison's novels, using the work that she did in the archives to retell the story of Morrison's creative process and her practice.

That's forthcoming from...

Knopf.

Autumn is an award-winning scholar of 19th century American literature, African American culture and writing, and she's done archival work on 19th century history.

It's a huge pleasure for me to get to talk to Autumn about her work in the

and imaginative practice.

So Professor Autumn Womack, it's such a delight to have you on The Secret Life of Books.

There could not be a better person to speak with about Toni Morrison, both in terms of your history with this writer and in terms of the work that you're doing, even as we speak.

I would love to ask you, first of all, about Morrison's longstanding and yet still rising status as a classic American writer.

I think many people would think of her as the most important female voice in American literature.

So will you tell us a little bit about, for you, what makes Toni Morrison a classic?

Why is she such an important writer?

You know, to take The Bluest Eye, for example, because that's her first novel, what are the big, let's call them universal, the universal questions that she sets out with?

That's so interesting.