The Source of Self-Regard

TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels and three essay collections. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Here is the Nobel Prize winner in her own words: a rich gathering of her most important essays and speeches, spanning four decades that "speaks to today s social and political moment as directly as this morning s headlines (NPR).

These pages give us her searing prayer for the dead of 9/11, her Nobel lecture on the power of language, her searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., her heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. She looks deeply into the fault lines of culture and freedom: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, black matter(s), human rights, the artist in society, the Afro-American presence in American literature. And she turns her incisive critical eye to her own work (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, Paradise) and that of others.

An essential collection from an essential writer, The Source of Self-Regard shines with the literary elegance, intellectual prowess, spiritual depth, and moral compass that have made Toni Morrison our most cherished and enduring voice.

Peril

Part I THE FOREIGNER S HOME
The Dead of September 11
The Foreigner s Home
Racism and Fascism
Home
Wartalk
The War on Error
A Race in Mind: The Press in Deed
Moral Inhabitants
The Price of Wealth, the Cost of Care
The Habit of Art
The Individual Artist
Arts Advocacy
Sarah Lawrence Commencement Address
The Slavebody and the Blackbody
Harlem on My Mind: Contesting Memory
     Meditation on Museums, Culture, and Integration
Women, Race, and Memory
Literature and Public Life
The Nobel Lecture in Literature
Cinderella s Stepsisters
The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations

Interlude BLACK MATTER(S)
Tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.
Race Matters
Black Matter(s)
Unspeakable Things Unspoken:
      The Afro-American Presence in American Literature
Academic Whispers 
Gertrude Stein and the Difference She Makes 
Hard, True, and Lasting 

Part II GOD S LANGUAGE
James Baldwin Eulogy
The Site of Memory
God s Language
Grendel and His Mother
The Writer Before the Page
The Trouble with Paradise
On Beloved
Chinua Achebe
Introduction of Peter Sellars
Tribute to Romare Bearden
Faulkner and Women
The Source of Self-Regard
Rememory
Memory, Creation, and Fiction
Goodbye to All That: Race, Surrogacy, and Farewell
Invisible Ink: Reading the Writing and Writing the Reading

Sources