Morrison’s work in the 1990’s continued to pro-
vide Americans with profound questions about
themselves, their culture, and most importantly
their history. One year before she won the Nobel
Prize, Morrison published her first book-length vol-
ume of literary criticism:Playing in the Dark: Whiteness
and the Literar y Imagination. Therein, she explores
the way in which the American literary tradition has
always contained an unacknowledged African pres-
ence. She explores this theme in canonical Ameri-
can writers, such as Mark Twain, Herman Melville,
Willa Cather, and Edgar Allan Poe. Later in the de-
cade, she producedParadise(1997), a novel that
completed the trilogy started in 1987 withBeloved
and included the 1992 novelJazz. Each of these nov-
els grows out of a specific point in African American
history, often a specific and relatively unknown his-
torical event.Belovedis based on the newspaper ac-
count of Margaret Garner’s partially successful at-
tempt to kill her children upon the return of her
slave master.Paradiseis based on an advertisement
for an all-black township in the West: “Come Pre-
pared or Not at All.” InBeloved, she addresses the un-
explored reality of the life of an average slave, not a
slave who survived to write and speak about slavery.
InParadise, she examines that most persistent of
American and human obsessions—the attempt to
create paradise—and turns the matter on its head:
What if paradise depends upon the absence of white
people? In these three novels—Beloved,Jazz, andPar-
adise—Morrison takes her readers from the 1850’s
to the 1970’s, essentially rewriting and reexamining
the history of American and African American life.
Impact Toni Morrison’s literary achievement en-
ables Americans to understand themselves on
deeper, more realistic levels. Further, it deepens and
broadens the shared language of black and white,
male and female, educated and uneducated.
Further Reading
Beaulieu, Elizabeth Ann, ed.The Toni Morrison Ency-
clopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003.
Morrison, Toni.Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the
Literar y Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1992.
Rice, Herbert William.Toni Morrison and the Ameri-
can Tradition: A Rhetorical Reading. New York: Pe-
ter Lang, 1996.
Weinstein, Philip.What Else but Love: The Ordeal of
Race in Faulkner and Morrison. New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1996.
H. William RiceSee also African Americans; Literature in the
United States; Nobel Prizes; Publishing; Winfrey,
Oprah. Mount Pleasant riot
The Event A two-day civil disturbance in
the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of
Washington, D.C.
Date May 5-6, 1991
Place Washington, D.C.The Mount Pleasant riot in Washington, D.C., in May,
1991, highlighted the tensions between the primarily
English-speaking African American metropolitan police
force and the primarily Spanish-speaking residents of the
Mount Pleasant neighborhood. It further exposed various
procedural and communications failures of the police de-
partment and widespread violation of civil rights by mem-
bers of the metropolitan police force.586 Mount Pleasant riot The Nineties in America
Toni Morrison.(Stephen Chernin/Reuters/Landov)