The Who2 Blog

Birthday Twins: Toni Morrison and Johnny Hart

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison and Reuben Award-winning cartoonist Johnny Hart were born on this very same day in 1931

Hart arrived in Endicott, New York, while Morrison was turning up 380 miles away in Lorain, Ohio. 

Hart became a super-prolific cartoonist, drawing both “B.C.” and “The Wizard of Id,” strips which have continued with others artists since his death in 2007. He won the Reuben, cartooning’s high award, in 1968.  (His autobiography panel for the Reuben website is below.)

Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (quoted above, yes) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and Morrison herself won the Nobel Prize in 1993. The Nobel committee said “in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, [she] gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”

She’s a professor at Princeton and celebrates her 80th birthday today.

Learn more about Toni Morrison or Johnny Hart >>


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