When Toni Morrison died earlier this year, the world lost one of its most influential literary voices.
But Morrison wasn’t a literary wunderkind. The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s first novel, wasn’t published until she was 39. And her last, “God Help the Child,” appeared when she was 84. Morrison published four novels, four children’s books, many essays and other works of nonfiction after the age of 70.
Roger Kreuz is an Associate Dean and Director of Graduate Studies in the
College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychology at the
University of Memphis. He earned his graduate degrees in psychology at
Princeton University. Dr. Kreuz conducts research on discourse,
pragmatics, and nonliteral language. He is the coauthor (with Richard
Roberts) of "Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults
Learn a Foreign Language," "Getting Through: The Pleasures and Perils of
Cross-Cultural Communication," and "Changing Minds: How Aging Affects
Language and How Language Affects Aging" (all published by the MIT
Press). A book on irony and sarcasm will be published in the spring of
2020.
