Description

The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations by Toni Morrison (2019, 1st ed.)

Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self-Regard is a commanding collection of 43 essays, speeches, and meditations spanning four decades of one of America’s most influential literary voices. This volume is organized into three sections—“The Foreigner’s Home,” “Black Matter(s),” and “God’s Language”—each introduced by a piece honoring the dead, from the victims of 9/11 to Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin.

Across these works, Morrison examines urgent social and political concerns, including immigration, human rights, racism, gender, and the role of the artist, while offering incisive commentary on literature, culture, and the moral power of language.  Her reflections engage with themes of belonging, identity, and historical memory, revealing the contradictions of being simultaneously “native” and “alien” within one’s own country.

Featuring meditations on her own novels and tributes to figures such as Romare Bearden and Toni Cade Bambara, this collection stands as a luminous testament to Morrison’s enduring legacy and intellectual brilliance.

Copyright: This hardcover copy published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2019, second printing, with pink cover art including title in shiny gold relief and “Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature”.

Condition: Okay. Used. 

U.S. media mail shipping included.

ISBN-10: 0525521038

ISBN-13: 9780525521037

Dewey Decimal: 814.6