Toni Morrison

Early life

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, the second of four children in a working-class Black family. She studied English, with a minor in classics, at Howard University, graduating in 1953 and acting with the Howard University Players. In 1955 she earned a master's degree in English at Cornell University.

Teacher and editor

Morrison taught at Texas Southern University and then for several years at Howard. There she joined a writers' group and began the story that became her first novel. In 1965 she took an editorial job at L. W. Singer, a textbook division of Random House in Syracuse, New York. In 1968 she moved to the trade department in New York City.

Princeton University Library describes her as the first Black woman editor in Random House's fiction department. She championed writers including Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Angela Davis and Huey Newton, and co-edited The Black Book (1974), a collection documenting Black American history. She left the firm in the early 1980s to write full time.

Novels

The Bluest Eye appeared in 1970, followed by Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Tar Baby (1981). Beloved (1987) was inspired by the history of slavery and its aftermath. When it was passed over for the National Book Award, 48 Black writers and critics signed a public letter of protest, and in 1988 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Later novels included Jazz (1992), Paradise (1997), Love (2003), A Mercy (2008), Home (2012) and God Help the Child (2015). She also wrote essays, criticism, libretti and plays.

Recognition

In 1993 Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Black woman to win it. The Swedish Academy cited novels marked by "visionary force and poetic import." From 1989 she held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton, where she founded the Princeton Atelier, a program bringing artists to work with students. She retired from teaching in 2006. In 2012 President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Legacy

Morrison died in New York on August 5, 2019, at 88. Her papers are held at Princeton University Library. Her novels are widely taught in schools and universities, and critics regard them as experimental in form and central to how American literature treats Black history, memory and identity.