NOBEL WATCH : Visible Women

Toni Morrison once told a group of young writers to write the novel they wanted to read. She writes to satisfy herself. She has done that and also satisfied millions of others with novels that transcend boundaries imposed by race, gender and geography.

Her richly detailed writing evokes Southern roots. Her parents, rural sharecroppers, escaped the fields and migrated to Ohio, where Morrison escaped many, though not all, of the limits imposed by segregation and its legacy.

That in 1993 she is the first African-American to win a Nobel Prize is a reflection of the obstacles she has overcome to tell her stories of strong black women, weak black women, pretty black women, ugly black women, old black women and young black women.

She refuses to shrink from the ugly realities of racism and sexism. Her characters shatter stereotypes. The diversity in their circumstances, their struggles, their victories provide universal appeal.

Her earliest novels, “The Bluest Eye” and “Sula,” enthralled young black women who found themselves in those stories. Her appeal became broader with the publication of “Song of Solomon,” which won a National Book Critics Award, and “Beloved,” her saga of a woman who fights slavery by murdering her daughter, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her latest work, “Jazz,” reveals another dimension of what it was like to be black in Harlem in the 1920s.

For centuries, African-American women were largely invisible in literature. Toni Morrison has helped fill that void.