Getty Images: Fadek, Timothy
Toni Morrison, in her New York apartment, 2008.
The first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison had an unhurried journey to authordom—she didn’t publish her first novel, The Bluest Eye, until she was thirty-nine years old. Her signature dreadlocked hair similarly came later in her life. Her silvery natty dreads are symbolic of a powerful cultural identity and also evoke the Rastafarian roots and vibe of the king of cool, Bob Marley. To many, dreadlocks also run deeper as characteristic of a spiritual counterculture, but to Morrison they are no signifier of anything but herself. She said in a 2012 interview in The Guardian, “I’m not a stereotype; I’m not somebody else’s version of who I am.” She wears her dreadlocks with self-assured and transcendent elegance.