This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Writer Tony Morrison died in 2019, and something interesting

has happened since. The tributes haven't slowed down. They've actually accelerated.

Publishers have reissued her novels. I come across her quotes on social media almost every day,

and there's a real conversation happening right now about her

legacy, what it means, whether the reverence around her has gotten so massive that it's actually

getting in the way of the work itself. My guest today, author and Harvard professor Namwali

Serpell has been reading more since she was a teenager and teaching her for nearly two decades.

She's watched the critical conversation circle the same territory.

Morrison's identity, her biography, her iconic status, while the genius of what Morrison was actually doing on the page

hasn't really been examined.

That gap is what has become her new book on Morrison, which moves

through all 11 of her novels, from the bluest eye to God Help the Child, as well as Morrison's

criticism, plays, and poetry. Namwali Sorpell is a professor of English at Harvard University,

and her own novels, The Old Drift and the

Furrows, have won the Clark Award and been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle.

Namwali, welcome to fresh air. Thank you so much. Namwali, the word difficult, it has been used to

describe both Morrison as a person and as a writer.

And you write early in this book that, quote,

I have been called difficult more times in my life than I can count,

but I only began to understand to discover the meanings and uses of my own difficulty because of Tony Morrison.

What did Morrison show you?

It's very interesting to look back at the way that an author was received at their time

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