The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

Overview
Published in 2019, shortly before Toni Morrison's death, The Source of Self-Regard collects essays, speeches, and meditations written across decades. The pieces range from formal lectures and prize-acceptance addresses to book reviews and quiet reflections, all animated by Morrison's insistence on language as a moral and imaginative force. The volume functions as both a portrait of a singular intellectual life and a companion to the novels, offering the author's candid thinking about art, history, and human dignity.
Morrison's voice throughout is at once exacting and capacious. She writes as a novelist who thinks like a critic and as a moralist who never sacrifices wonder to instruction. The collection resists simple categorization: it is personal without being confessional, polemical without being narrowly partisan, elegiac without surrendering to despair.

Themes
Race and memory thread the book, but Morrison treats race not as an isolable theme but as a lens through which American language and national identity are shaped. Many pieces interrogate how stories are told about the past, who is allowed to be visible in the cultural archive, and how silence and omission function as forms of violence. Her attention to "the site of memory" insists that acts of remembering are ethical as well as aesthetic.
Another abiding concern is the responsibility of the artist. Morrison argues for a moral imagination that recognizes complexity and refuses reductive sentimentality. She insists that art must make readers feel the weight of history while preserving the freedom to imagine new forms of communal life. The essays repeatedly reclaim language as a tool of repair and resistance.

Form and Style
Prose in the collection moves between crystalline aphorism and richly textured narrative. Morrison's sentences often compress paradox: tenderness coexists with stern judgment; humor softens pain without excusing it. Her rhetorical gifts as a novelist, the ear for cadence, the pressure of image, the architecture of a paragraph, translate into propulsive, persuasive essays and speeches.
The variety of form is important to the book's power. A commencement address carries the rhetorical sweep of an oration; a book review tightens into an economy of critique; a meditation unfolds like a short story. Across these modes, Morrison demonstrates an instinct for the precise word and an impatience with euphemism.

Notable Passages and Voices
Among the highlights are public interventions that went beyond literary circles to address civic life. Her Nobel Lecture appears as a manifesto of sorts: a defense of fiction's ethical work and a meditation on language's capacity to create empathy. Other speeches and essays recount encounters with literature and politics that illuminate Morrison's intellectual friendships and feuds, showcasing her gift for both provocation and consolation.
Personal meditations provide quieter but no less revealing moments. They often register as elegies for individuals and for eras, marked by lines that linger because they name a loss or a stubborn truth. Even when responding to other writers, Morrison makes clear how personal and public history are braided together.

Legacy and Use
The Source of Self-Regard clarifies why Morrison's novels have such moral force: the essays articulate the philosophical commitments that undergird her fiction. The collection serves readers who want to trace the ideas behind her characters and for those who seek a model of literary citizenship, an author who treats language as a public trust.
As a final testament of sorts, the book captures Morrison's refusal to choose comfort over honesty. It offers rigorous counsel about art and life, insisting that imagination must be rooted in ethical seriousness. For readers who cherish language's power to reveal, indict, and repair, these pages are at once a summation and an invitation.