Welcome to Words Matter with Katie Barlow and Joe Lockhart.

Last week we lost one of the most influential and celebrated novelists in American literary

history, Tony Morrison.

A novelist, S.A.S.T. and Princeton professor Morrison wrote nine major novels all of which

earned extensive critical acclaim.

As Oprah Winfrey said after her passing last week, she was a magician with language who

understood the power of words.

She used them to royal us, to wake us, to educate us, and help us grapple with our deepest

wounds and try to comprehend them.

A woman who certainly understood that words matter.

Among dozens of other awards and achievements, she won both a Pulitzer Prize and American Book

Award in 1988 for her novel Beloved.

And in 1993, Tony Morrison became the first black woman of any nationality to win a Nobel

Prize.

The citation for her award in literature declared Morrison to be an author, quote,

who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential

aspect of American reality.

In 2012, Tony Morrison was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama,

and during her commencement address at Rutgers University in 2011, Tony Morrison encouraged

graduates to seek a meaningful life, something she herself had certainly achieved.

So this week, we give American treasure, Tony Morrison, the final word.

I have often wished that Jefferson had not used that phrase the pursuit of happiness as

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