France Honors 'Beloved' US Novelist Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is 'beloved' in France, which awards her Legion of Honor
The Associated Press , Jenny Barchfield.

PARIS November 3, 2010 (AP)

U.S novelist Toni Morrison, left, smiles after being awarded of the Legion of Honor by French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand, right, in Paris, Wednesday Nov. 3, 2010. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)

In a ceremony in a gilded hall in the ministry, Frederic Mitterrand pinned a red and gold medal onto the celebrated author's jacket as a scrum of photographers snapped away.
Mitterrand called Morrison — a Nobel laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize — "the greatest American novelist of her time."
"I want to tell you that you incarnate what's most beautiful about America ... (that) which gives a black child, born during segregation into a modest family in a medium-sized Ohio city an exceptional destiny," Mitterrand told Morrison, as she listened on from a gilt-covered armchair nearby. "You were the first woman writer to tell the painful history of Afro-Americans."
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