Tuesday on the NewsHour: Toni Morrison | Art Beat | PBS NewsHour | PBS: At a White House ceremony Tuesday, President Obama will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, to 13 people, including one of the most celebrated American novelists, Toni Morrison.She's renowned for works such as "Song of Solomon," "Jazz" and "Beloved," for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988. When she became the first African-American woman to win a Nobel Prize in 1993, Morrison's citation described her as an author "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."
Jeffrey Brown recently sat down with Morrison in the recently restored historic Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C., to discuss her life of writing and her 10th novel, "Home," which puts a spotlight on institutional and casual racism in 1950s America. As she told him: "I was interested in, what was it like before the late '60s and '70s? There was something. And it wasn't what I remember. There was something going on in the country that really became the seeds and the little green shoots that became the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam movement. "
