Toni Morrison

BORN: FEBRUARY 18, 1931, LORAIN, OH

DIED: AUGUST 5, 2019, BRONX, NY

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.

T oni Morrison is the first Black woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her novels The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved are among her most famous and critically acclaimed works. Toni’s career has also encompassed teaching English literature, editing, literary criticism, playwriting, and public speaking. Her extraordinary writing has earned her international awards and honors including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Born to working-class parents in an Ohio steel industry town, Toni’s birth name was Chloe Ardellia Wofford, but she took the baptismal name Anthony after converting to Catholicism at age twelve. Later she adopted the nickname Toni. Storytelling, singing, sharing history and folklore, and telling ghost stories were central to Wofford family life. Toni drew upon this legacy and her family’s love of Black culture in her epic, mythic, and richly textured novels.

Following her graduation from Howard University in 1953, Toni taught at several colleges, divorced her husband, and raised their two sons as a single mother. She joined a writer’s group, then became a fiction editor at Random House, where she worked for eighteen years, publishing the seminal work The Black Book in 1974 and memoirs by Muhammad Ali, Lucille Clifton, and Angela Davis. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, about the ravages of slavery on an African American family, was published when she was thirty-nine years old.

Beloved, based on the true story of ex-slave Margaret Garner, was published in 1988 and won the Pulitzer Prize. It was an Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection and was later made into a movie starring Oprah and Danny Glover. In 2006, the New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best work of American fiction published in the previous twenty-five years.

A Paris Review interview described Toni as “a master of the public novel, examining the relationships between races and sexes and the struggle between civilization and nature, while at the same time combining myth and the fantastic with a deep political sensitivity.”