A New Book of Toni Morrison’s University Lectures, Now Collected for the First Time, Shares Some of the Legendary Novelist’s Most Important Lessons

At Princeton, the author analyzed the depictions of Blackness in the works of canonical American authors

Kunjal Bastola | Editorial Intern

March 23, 2026

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Before her career as a novelist, Toni Morrison was a teacher.

The famed American author, best known for works such as Beloved and Song of Solomon, was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931. After attending Howard University to study English and Cornell University for graduate school, she returned to Howard in 1957 to teach English. She then joined a writer’s group and developed a short story which would become The Bluest Eye (1970), her acclaimed first novel.

Morrison was often making history: In the 1960s, she became the first Black woman to be an editor at the publisher Random House. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved, and in 1993, she became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize for her contributions to writing and publishing. She died in 2019 at 88.

Through her novels, essay collections, children’s books, speeches, interviews and a feature-length documentary, her literary legacy lives on: This year, several Ohio literary groups led the launch of a statewide, yearlong celebration of Morrison’s life and work.

“She emboldened other writers to center the African American experience, and explore rare, sometimes shocking, themes, such as incest, insanity and colorism,” says Deborah Tulani Salahu-Din, curator of language and literature at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, in an email. “Through all these mechanisms, Morrison exerted influence in the literary sphere and broadened the American literary canon.”

In 1989, Morrison began teaching literature, creative writing and African American studies at Princeton University. For the first time, a series of her Princeton lectures has been compiled into a book, Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon. Published last month, nearly seven years after her death, the new collection explores race in mainstream American literature. Now, readers can engage with Morrison, not only through the lens of her fiction or essays, but through her role as a teacher.

Ford Morrison, the author’s son, helped compile the lectures, which come from a course she taught titled “Studies in American Africanism,” and wrote the foreword for the book.

“She asked her students to meet the writing where it lived, without shortcuts, without softening. The same intensity threads through every page here,” he writes.

Carolyn Denard, a scholar and educator of Morrison’s literary works and the founder of the Toni Morrison Society, says that Morrison was a “keen observer” of the lives of Black people in the United States, particularly “the ways in which African Americans were depicted in literature by white American writers.” Her observations are part of this new book, as Morrison examines works such as Sapphira and the Slave Girl by Willa Cather, Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron and Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner.

Claudia Brodsky, a comparative literature scholar at Princeton University and friend and colleague of Morrison, wrote the introduction to Language as Liberation. While working on the project, Brodsky says she gained a deeper understanding of how Morrison challenged the thinking about the depictions of Black people in literature and how those ideas have framed society’s collective consciousness over time.

Morrison observed “the difficulty that white American writers had with portraying” Black characters, Denard says. She adds that these authors often “don’t really know what to do with these characters, because they don’t know how to penetrate beyond the kind of surface, representational, often stereotypical, presentation of these characters.”

In one of her lectures, Morrison discusses Cather, a writer best known for her books about life in the Great Plains, such as O Pioneers! and My Ántonia. Cather’s last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), is the story of a bitter white woman named Sapphira who struggles with edema. Sapphira believes her husband is having a relationship with an enslaved teenager named Nancy and becomes irrationally jealous and abusive toward her. Sapphira’s daughter, an abolitionist who is not close with her mother, enlists her father’s aid to help Nancy escape to freedom.

“In some ways this novel is a classic fugitive slave narrative: the thrilling escape of the bound into freedom. Except that we learn practically nothing of the trials of the fugitive’s journey, because the emphasis is on Nancy’s fugitive state within the household before her escape. Except that the real fugitive, the text asserts, is the slave mistress. Except that the plot itself is a fugitive from the author,” says Morrison in her lecture on Cather.

Brodsky says she believes Morrison’s messages are much needed. “There is no better time to read a book of Toni Morrison’s lectures on American literature than now,” Brodsky says. Some of Morrison’s own works—The Bluest Eye and Beloved—have been banned in school districts across the country.

Salahu-Din notes that Morrison faced heightened obstacles as a Black writer wanting to write about Black people, compared to some of the white canonical authors she discusses in the lectures.

“She challenged any criticism that suggested writers of African descent should cease writing so much from this inherent space that reflects both their rich and complex life experiences and creative imaginations,” Salahu-Din says. “She pointed out that such expectation is never levied at writers of non-African descent. Mark Twain, for example, writes without challenge from the gut of his Missouri experience, and William Faulkner (about whom Morrison wrote her master’s thesis), can quietly pen novels fueled by the depths of his Mississippi reality.”

The work that is perhaps most relevant in understanding Language as Liberation is Morrison’s 1992 literary critique, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, in which she analyzes the way white American authors foster perceptions of Blackness that defined not only their works but the American literary canon. While the audience for Playing in the Dark was mostly scholars, Denard explains that Language as Liberation offers the public “a guide in Morrison, who sheds a light on what is hidden in plain view.”

“This book grew from the belief that my mother’s teaching materials, her lectures, essays and notes to students deserve to stand with her published work,” writes Ford Morrison. “They were written for the classroom, where she believed the glorious world of thinking and teaching happened in real time, and where language could still surprise.”

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Kunjal Bastola is an editorial intern with Smithsonian magazine.