Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on 18 February 1931 in Lorain, Ohio. She was the second of four children in a working-class family. Her father told her African American folk tales and ghost stories, and she grew up surrounded by a rich oral tradition that would deeply influence her writing. She was the first student in her family to read.

Morrison studied English at Howard University and Cornell University, where she wrote a master's thesis on the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. She began her career as a teacher and later became an editor at Random House, where she worked for nearly two decades, championing Black writers including Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones and Angela Davis.

Her debut novel The Bluest Eye was published in 1970. Song of Solomon (1977) won the National Book Critics Circle Award and became a bestseller. But it was Beloved (1987) — a devastating novel inspired by the true story of a formerly enslaved woman who killed her infant daughter rather than let her be taken back into slavery — that cemented her place in the literary canon. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

In 1993, Morrison became the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel Committee praised her for giving 'life to an essential aspect of American reality' with 'visionary force and poetic import.' She taught at Princeton University for 16 years and continued writing into her eighties.

Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of 88. She left behind eleven novels, each one a masterpiece of American literature. President Barack Obama called her 'a supreme American novelist of our time.'