Though perhaps best known to most as the first African American Nobel laureate in literature, it would be short-sighted - as evidenced by the other essays in this volume - to limit Toni Morrison's incredible contributions to the world of arts and letters to her achievements as a novelist alone. The author of scores of critical essays and articles, published speeches, book reviews, interviews, opinion pieces; author of Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination; editor of both Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality and Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case; and a professor of writing and literature for decades, Morrison's record, role, and influence as an intellectual are by any measure extraordinary. Indeed, it could be argued that Morrison's corpus is best understood when read as a broad, far-reaching intellectual contribution that defies our contemporary artist-scholar divide with which we have become increasingly comfortable in the academy.