Toni Morrison inducted into France's Legion of Honour

Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning U.S. author Toni Morrison has been madean officer of the French Legion of Honour.

France's culture minister, Frederic Mitterrand, inducted Morrison at a ceremony in Paris Wednesday.

Morrison said she felt "prized" when accepting the honour, which was created by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 to recognize significant contributions toFrench military, culture, science or society.

"You were the first woman writer to tell the painful history of Afro-Americans You're 'beloved'," said Mitterrand, referring to Morrison's acclaimed 1987 novel Beloved.

He also called Morrison, "the greatest American novelist of her time."

Born in Ohio in 1931, Morrison grew up in a working class family but went on to study at Howard University, Cornell University and Yale.

She has been a chair at Princeton since 1989 and lectures on African-American literature.

Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988 for Beloved and won the Nobel Prizefor Literature in 1993.