TONI MORRISON was born in Lorain, Ohio. The recipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, and of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Beloved, she is the author of six other novels. The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, which won the 1978 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, Tar Baby, Jazz, and Paradise, which are available or forthcoming in Plume editions. She is Robert F.Goheen Professor, Council of the Humanities, at Princeton University.