Toni Morrison (Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison has made American literary history with her greats “The Bluest Eye,” “Song of Solomon,” “Beloved.” She’s looked into the heart of race, violence, sexuality, suffering, redemption.

Now, Toni Morrison — along with fellow literary greats Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Nadine Gordimer, the late John Updike, and more — is looking directly at the role of the writer. At censorship and free expression and the importance of imagination’s free rein to a society’s fundamental health and growth.

This hour, On Point: A conversation with Toni Morrison on the power of the free word.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Toni Morrison joins us from New York. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, for her novel “Beloved.” She is editor of the new collection “Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word,” which features essays from writers John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, Orhan Pamuk, and others. Her most recent novel, published in 2008, is “A Mercy.”

You can read excerpts from “Burn This Book” at the publisher’s website.

In this video Toni Morrison delivers her acceptance speech for the PEN/Borders Literary Service Award last December:

Freedom of speech is enshrined right there in the American Bill of Rights, but Americans took a long time to really embrace it. By 1798, President John Adams was already blowing by the First Amendment to go after supporters of Thomas Jefferson.

More than a century later, in World War I, Americans were sentenced to 20 years in prison for throwing anti-war leaflets off a rooftop in New York.

Now, post-9/11, the great commentator and longtime New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis is looking at the health and history of free speech today.

This hour, On Point: Anthony Lewis and freedom of speech.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Anthony Lewis, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and former columnist for The New York Times, where he worked from 1948 to 2001. His new book is “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment.”