Toni Morrison Stamps

With this stamp, the U.S. Postal Service celebrates Toni Morrison (1931-2019), whose artfully crafted novels explored thediverse voices and multifaceted experiences ofAfrican Americans

Eager to see the previously untold stories of Afican American women portrayed in fiction, Morrison pubished her first novelThe Bluest Eye in 1970. The book remains a canonical novel about the damage of internalized racism and society's neglectand mistreatment of African American girls and has become a mainstay of high school and college literature classes.

Morrison would achieve further success with Sula. her 1973 novel that dramatizes the relationship between two childhoodfiends. Song of Solomon, published in 1977, was both a national bestseller and a recipient of tremendous critical acclaim forits portraval of the African American search for identity. Her 1981 novel Tar Baby was a study of racism and confictingidentities on a Caribbean island.

In 1987, the publication of Beloved brought Morrison a new level of critical success. The acclaimed novel tells the story of awoman who escapes enslavement but murders her own daughter to prevent her from being returned to slavery. A harrowincrumination on trauma and the lingering, even haunting nature of the past, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize and firmly securedVorrison's reputation as a great American writer.

In 1989, Morrison became the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. In 1993, she wasawarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first African American woman to receive the distinction.

Morrison was the rare author who achieved both bestseler status and critical success. in her later novels, including Paradise(1998), Love (2003), A Mercy (2008). Home (2012), and God Help the Child (2015), she continued to experiment withlanguage and push the possibilities of storytelling.

Art director Ethel Kessler designed this stamp with a photograph by Deborah Feingold.

The Toni Morrison stamp is being issued as a Forever® stamp in panes of20. This Forever stamp is always equal in value tothe current First-Class Mail® one-ounce price.

Made in the USA.