The literary community reacts

Isn’t it funny how right after I post about how I don’t like to post about politics, there are all these political posts? HAHAHAHAHAHA.

Ahem.

No but seriously, this is relevant to literature, which is the only reason I offer it up here now:

Last winter, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison received a phone call from Sen. Barack Obama, then the underdog to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Obama had contacted Morrison to ask for her support. But before they got into politics, the author and the candidate had a little chat about literature.

“He began to talk to me about one of the books I had written, ‘Song of Solomon,’ and how it had meant a lot to him,” Morrison said in a postelection interview from her office at Princeton University, where for years she has taught creative writing.

“And I had read his first book (`Dreams From My Father’). I was astonished by his ability to write, to think, to reflect, to learn and turn a good phrase. I was very impressed. This was not a normal political biography.”

For Morrison and others, the election of Obama matters not because he will be the first black president or because the vast majority of writers usually vote for Democrats. Writers welcome Obama as a peer, a thinker, a man of words – his own words.

I wonder if I should read his books? I do love the title “The Audacity of Hope”…

“But finally having a writer-president — and I don’t mean a published author, but someone who knows the full value of the carefully chosen word — I suddenly feel, for the first time, not only like a writer who happens to be American, but an American writer.”