Toni Morrison (born February 18, 1931,Lorain,Ohio, U.S.—died August 5, 2019, Bronx, New York) was an American writer noted for her examination of Black experience (particularly Black female experience) within the Blackcommunity and for her poetic, luminous prose. Considered one of the greatest contemporary American novelists, she received theNobel Prize for Literature in 1993, becoming the first Black female writer in history to be honored with the prize.

Early life and education

Wofford grew up in theMidwest in a family that possessed an intense love of and appreciation for Blackculture. Storytelling, songs, andfolktales were a deeply formative part of her childhood. When Wofford was 12 years old she converted toRoman Catholicism and took “Anthony” as herbaptismal name in honor ofSt. Anthony of Padua. After graduating fromhigh school, she attendedHoward University inWashington, D.C., where she began going by the nickname “Toni.” She graduated from Howard in 1953 with abachelor’s degree in English and then began her graduate studies atCornell University, receiving hermaster’s degree in 1955. After teaching atTexas Southern University for two years, she taught at Howard from 1957 to 1964. In 1958 she married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect. They were married six years before divorcing and had two sons together.

Editing and teaching career

In 1965 Morrison began working as a textbook editor for a subsidiary ofRandom House inSyracuse,New York. Two years later she was recruited as an editor at Random House inNew York City, where she worked for more than 15 years. She was the first female African American editor in the company’s history.

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As an editor, Morrison published works by manyAfrican American writers and public figures, such asToni Cade Bambara,Henry Dumas,Angela Davis,Huey P. Newton,Muhammad Ali, and Gayl Jones. Of her work as an editor, she once stated, “I look very hard for Black fiction because I want to participate in developing acanon of Black work…where Black people are talking to Black people.” In 1974 she worked with editor Middleton A. Harris to compile a vast collection ofnewspaper writings, photographs, letters, handbills, and other items documenting the Black experience for anencyclopedic work titledThe Black Book. While working on this project, she discovered the story of Margaret Garner that would inspire hernovelBeloved.

In 1983 Morrison left her job at Random House, and the following year she began teaching writing at theState University of New York (SUNY) at Albany. In 1989 she left SUNY to join the faculty ofPrinceton University; she retired in 2006.

(Read W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1926 Britannica essay on African American literature.)

The Bluest Eye

Morrison began writing fiction during her editing and teaching career. Eventually, she began crafting one of her early short stories, about a Black girl who longs to have blue eyes, into a longer work. That story became Morrison’s first book,The Bluest Eye (1970), a novel of initiation concerning a victimized adolescent Black girl who is obsessed by white standards of beauty.The New York Timespraised the book for “a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.”

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Sula,Song of Solomon, andTar Baby

In 1973 Morrison published her second novel,Sula, which examines (among other issues) thedynamics of female friendship and the expectations for conformity within the Black community. In 1975 it was a finalist for aNational Book Award. Her next novel,Song of Solomon (1977), featured a male narrator in search of his identity and incorporated elements ofmagical realism; its publication brought Morrison to national attention, and it won that year’s National Book Critics Circle Award. It was followed byTar Baby (1981), which is set on aCaribbean island and explores conflicts ofrace,class, andgender.

Beloved

In 1987 Morrison published the critically acclaimedBeloved, which won aPulitzer Prize for fiction. Set in the 19th century and based on a true story, the novel tells of a young enslaved woman named Sethe who runs away from her enslavers and, at the point of recapture, kills her infant daughter in order to spare her a life ofslavery. Eighteen years later, the daughter returns to haunt Sethe and other family members, a plot development that many readers and critics interpreted as ametaphor for America’s hauntinglegacy of slavery. The novel was praised for its compelling storytelling andevocative prose, a mix ofAfrican American dialect andstream of consciousness:

I am Beloved and she is mine.…Three times I lost her: once with the flowers because of the noisy clouds of smoke; once when she went into the sea instead of smiling at me; once under the bridge when I went in to join her and she came toward me but did not smile.…Now I have found her in this house. She smiles at me and it is my own face smiling. I will not lose her again. She is mine.

Michiko Kakutani ofThe New York Timeslikened its plot and characters to “those in opera or Greek drama,” while inThe New Republic, criticStanley Crouch wrote that the novel “reads largely like amelodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the [TV] miniseries.” But Crouch’s opinion was an outlier;Beloved came to be regarded as a masterpiece ofAmerican literature. A filmadaptation of the novel was released in 1998, directed byJonathan Demme and starringOprah Winfrey andDanny Glover. Morrison revisited the story that had inspiredBeloved to write thelibretto forMargaret Garner (2005), anopera named for the real-life woman at the novel’s center.

(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on “Monuments of Hope.”)

Nobel Prize

In 1992 Morrison releasedJazz, a story of violence and passion set in New York City’sHarlem during the 1920s; a research assistant on the book was Princeton studentMacKenzie (Bezos) Scott. The following year she received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Inher Nobel lecture, Morrison spoke of the power oflanguage and its capability to bring meaning to the human experience:

Word-work is sublime…because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Later novels

Morrison’s subsequent novels wereParadise (1998), a richly detailed portrait of a Blackutopian community inOklahoma, andLove (2003), an intricate family story that reveals themyriad facets of love and itsostensible opposite.A Mercy (2008) deals with slavery and social class in 17th-century America. In the redemptiveHome (2012), a traumatizedKorean War veteran encountersracism after returning home and later overcomesapathy to rescue his sister. InGod Help the Child (2015), Morrison chronicled the ramifications ofchild abuse and neglect through the tale of Bride, a Black girl with dark skin who is born to light-skinned parents.

Nonfiction works and children’s books

Morrison also wrote and edited nonfiction. In 1992 she published a work ofcriticism,Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Many of her essays and speeches were collected inWhat Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction (2008; edited by Carolyn C. Denard) andThe Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019). She and her son Slade Morrison cowrote a number ofchildren’s books, including the Who’s Got Game? series,The Book of Mean People (2002), andPlease, Louise (2014).

She also pennedRemember: The Journey to School Integration (2004), which chronicles the hardships of Black students during the racialintegration of the American public school system. The book’s publication was timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary ofBrown v.Board of Education (1954), theU.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared schoolsegregation to be unconstitutional. Aimed at children, the book uses archival photographsjuxtaposed with captions speculating on the thoughts of their subjects. For that work, Morrison won theCoretta Scott King Award in 2005.

Legacy

The central theme of Morrison’s novels is theBlack American experience; in an unjust society, her characters struggle to find themselves and their cultural identity. Her use offantasy, her sinuous poetic style, and her rich interweaving of themythic gave her stories great strength and texture. In 2010 Morrison was made an officer of the FrenchLegion of Honor. Two years later she was awarded the U.S.Presidential Medal of Freedom.Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (2019) is adocumentary about her life and career.