Modern

Toni Morrison

1931–2019

Novelist and editor

If there is a book you want to read that has not been written, you must write it — she said versions of this to students, and the canon marks the familiar wording traditional. The novels are the part that is not in doubt. She edited other people’s books before the world edited its opinion of hers.

In the canon

  1. If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.A remark to students, repeated in talks from the early 1980s

All voices