Content area
Full text
Toni Morrison will not slip quietly into retirement, though she is leaving her teaching post at Princeton University after 17 years there. lust as the university was announcing a tribute to her, came new accolades for the 75-year-old writer. Literary colleagues polled by the New York Times Rook Review chose her 1987 novel Beloved as the "Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years." The review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, had asked 124 writers, critics and others to identify "the single best work of American fiction in the last 25 years." Beloved drew the most votes, 15. The results were announced before BookExpo America convened on May 18 in Washington, D.C., and the topic was hotly debated there and elsewhere before the Book Review published them May 21.
"Any other outcome would have been startling, since Morrison's novel has inserted itself into the American canon more completely...