Among the archives' treasures, he says, are documents tracing a creative disagreement between Morrison and renowned opera director Peter Sellars about William Shakespeare's play Othello. In March, scholars of Toni Morrison's life and career converged at Princeton for a conference related to the exhibit, co-organized by Womack and Kinohi Nishikawa. (They signed letters to each other with the words 'Yours in work.') She played an influential role in the literary careers of activists such as Angela Davis and Huey Newton and the writer Toni Cade Bambara. She was the first Black woman to be a senior editor there. Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953, earned an MA from Cornell, then worked as an editor for a textbook company before moving to the fiction department at Random House.

The day before the show opened, I was still adding things and taking things away, much to the joy of the archivists.' 'I really do believe that archives and collections are always telling us new stories.

'There are over 400 boxes of material,' Womack says of Morrison's archives. (The first, Nell Painter, had been hired only the year before.) Now, Autumn Womack, who is also a Princeton professor of literature and African American Studies, works in Morrison Hall, a building named after her.

When Morrison was hired at Princeton - in 1989 - she was the second Black woman faculty in the university's history. The exhibition commemorates the 30 th anniversary of that achievement. Toni Morrison remains the sole Black female recipient of a Literature Nobel. Princeton University Library Digital Imaging Studio Toni Morrison Papers, Special Collections, Princeton University Library

Sula by Toni Morrison