Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison was awarded the 57th Edward MacDowell Medal on Aug. 14 in Peterborough, N.H.

In her acceptance speech, she retold her famous anecdote of the origin of her first novel, The Bluest Eye: “There is some book that nobody has ever written, and I am determined to read it,” said Morrison. “So the only way I can read it is I have to write it.”

Appropriately, this is the chance the MacDowell Colony has given over 6,000 artists for more than one hundred years. Edward MacDowell, a composer, and Marian MacDowell, a pianist, bought a farm in Peterborough in 1896 and spent their summers dedicated to their crafts.

Both Edward and Marian found that the farm harnessed and channeled their creativity, which led them to make better music. Before Edward’s death in 1908, they converted their farm into a property where artists could work in both solitude and community, removing themselves from the bustle of the world around them.

Since 1960, MacDowell Colony has awarded the Edward MacDowell medal annually on Medal Day, the only day the colony is open to the public. The medal is awarded to an artist “who has made an outstanding contribution to American culture.” Among these artists are James Baldwin, Thornton Wilder, Alice Walker, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Joan Didion.

Morrison’s addition to this group of American artists is no surprise.

“Toni Morrison is indisputably the greatest living American novelist,” said MacDowell Colony Chairman, Fellow, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon.

Chabon continues, “With the prophetic vision that is the oldest, truest patrimony of American literature she sees us as we are now, as we have been and as we have never lived up to our promise to become. In the refiner’s fire of that vision she has shaped the raw, hard stuff of our singularly violent history—the factual and the mythic history alike—into epics of everyday tragedy, written in a prose style that like all the greatest American prose styles alloys the fiercely poetic and the wryly conversational to forge a language that shines with compassion and cuts like steel.”

Born in 1931 in a small town in Ohio, Morrison grew up with a strong love of reading, music, and folklore. Morrison earned a bachelor’s degree from Howard University and a master’s degree from Cornell, writing her thesis on suicide and alienation in William Faulker’s and Virginia Woolf’s work. Since, she has taught English at Texas Southern University, Howard University, and Yale University, and is currently the Robert F. Goheen Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Princeton University. Before publishing The Bluest Eye, Morrison was an editor and publisher at Random House.

Morrison is best known for her novels The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Beloved (1987), for which she has earned extensive critical acclaim.