Born and raised inLorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated fromHoward University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. Morrison earned a master's degree in American Literature fromCornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first Black female editor for fiction atRandom House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her novelBeloved was made into afilm in 1998. Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences ofracism in the United States and the Black American experience.
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford,[2] the second of four children from a working-class, Black family, inLorain, Ohio, to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford.[3] Her mother was born inGreenville, Alabama, and moved north with her family as a child. She was a homemaker and a devout member of theAfrican Methodist Episcopal Church.[4] George Wofford grew up inCartersville, Georgia. When Wofford was about 15 years old, a group of white peoplelynched two African-American businessmen who lived on his street. Morrison later said: "He never told us that he'd seen bodies. But he had seen them. And that was too traumatic, I think, for him."[5] Soon after the lynching, George Wofford moved to the racially integrated town of Lorain, Ohio, in the hope of escaping racism and securing gainful employment in Ohio's burgeoning industrial economy. He worked odd jobs and as a welder forU.S. Steel. In a 2015 interview Morrison said that her father, traumatized by his experiences of racism, hated whites so much he would not let them in the house.[6]
When Morrison was about two years old, her family's landlord set fire to the house in which they lived, while they were home, because her parents could not afford to pay rent. Her family responded to what she called this "bizarre form of evil" by laughing at the landlord rather than falling into despair. Morrison later said her family's response demonstrated how to keep your integrity and claim your own life in the face of acts of such "monumental crudeness".[7]
Morrison's parents instilled in her a sense of heritage and language through telling traditional African-American folktales, ghost stories, and singing songs.[4][8] She read frequently as a child; among her favorite authors wereJane Austen andLeo Tolstoy.[9]
In 1949, she enrolled atHoward University inWashington, D.C., seeking the company of fellow Black intellectuals.[12] Initially a student in the drama program at Howard, she studied theatre with celebrated drama teachersAnne Cooke Reid andOwen Dodson.[13] It was while at Howard that she encounteredracially segregated restaurants and buses for the first time.[5] She graduated in 1953 with a B.A. in English and a minor in Classics, and was able to work with key members of the Harlem Renaissance era such asAlain Locke andSterling Brown. Additionally, she participated in the university's theater group, known as the Howard Players, where she had the opportunity to travel the Deep South, which was a defining experience of her life.[14]
Morrison went on to earn a Master of Arts degree in 1955 fromCornell University inIthaca, New York.[15] Her master's thesis was titled "Virginia Woolf's andWilliam Faulkner's treatment of the alienated".[16] She taught English, first atTexas Southern University inHouston from 1955 to 1957, and then at Howard University for the next seven years. While teaching at Howard, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. Their first son was born in 1961 and she was pregnant with their second son when she and Harold divorced in 1964.[8][17][18]
After her divorce and the birth of her son Slade in 1965, Morrison began working as an editor for L. W. Singer, a textbook division of publisherRandom House,[4] inSyracuse, New York. Two years later, she transferred to Random House in New York City, where she became their first Black woman senior editor in the fiction department.[19][20]
Among other books that Morrison developed and edited isThe Black Book (1974), an anthology of photographs, illustrations, essays, and documents of Black life in the United States from the time of slavery to the 1920s.[5] Random House had been uncertain about the project but its publication met with a good reception. Alvin Beam reviewed the anthology for theClevelandPlain Dealer, writing: "Editors, like novelists, have brain children – books they think up and bring to life without putting their own names on the title page. Mrs. Morrison has one of these in the stores now, and magazines and newsletters in the publishing trade are ecstatic, saying it will go like hotcakes."[4]
The 2025 biographyToni at Random was written byDana A. Williams about Morrison's time employed as an editor at the publishing company Random House.[24] A review byMartha Southgate inThe New York Times stated: "With great respect and meticulous research, Williams reveals Morrison as a hard worker, a devoted literary citizen and one of the most important book editors of the 20th century."[25]The Chicago Review of Books described it as "an edifying look at a beloved creator's work as not only a writer, but a champion of writers",[26] while a starred review inPublishers Weekly concluded that the biography is "a triumphant account of an underexplored aspect of Morrison's influence on American literature."[27]
Morrison had begun writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard University who met to discuss their work. She attended one meeting with a short story about a Black girl who longed to haveblue eyes. Morrison later developed the story as her first novel,The Bluest Eye, getting up every morning at 4 am to write, while raising two children on her own.[17]
The Bluest Eye was published byHolt, Rinehart, and Winston in 1970, when Morrison was aged 39.[20] It was favorably reviewed inThe New York Times byJohn Leonard, who praised Morrison's writing style as being "a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry ... ButThe Bluest Eye is also history, sociology, folklore, nightmare and music."[28] The novel did not sell well at first, but theCity University of New York putThe Bluest Eye on its reading list for its newBlack studies department, as did other colleges, which boosted sales.[29] The book also brought Morrison to the attention of the acclaimed editorRobert Gottlieb atKnopf, an imprint of the publisher Random House. Gottlieb later edited all but one of Morrison's novels.[29]
In 1975, Morrison's second novelSula (1973), about a friendship between two Black women, was nominated for theNational Book Award. Her third novel,Song of Solomon (1977), follows the life of Macon "Milkman" Dead III, from birth to adulthood, as he discovers his heritage. This novel brought her national acclaim, being a main selection of theBook of the Month Club, the first novel by a Black writer to be so chosen sinceRichard Wright'sNative Son in 1940.[30]Song of Solomon also won theNational Book Critics Circle Award.[31]
Morrison gave her next novel,Tar Baby (1981), a contemporary setting. In it, a looks-obsessed fashion model, Jadine, falls in love with Son, a penniless drifter who feels at ease with being Black.[17]
Morrison's first play,Dreaming Emmett, is about the 1955 murder by white men of Black teenagerEmmett Till. The play was commissioned by the New York State Writers Institute at the State University of New York at Albany, where she was teaching at the time. It was produced in 1986 byCapital Repertory Theatre and directed byGilbert Moses.[38] Morrison was also a visiting professor atBard College from 1986 to 1988.[39]
Morrison, with her sons Ford (left) and Slade (right) at their upstate New York home, between 1980 and 1987
In 1987, Morrison published her most celebrated novel,Beloved. It was inspired by the true story of an enslaved African-American woman,Margaret Garner,[40] whose story Morrison had discovered when compilingThe Black Book. Garner had escaped slavery but was pursued by slave hunters. Facing a return to slavery, Garner killed her two-year-old daughter but was captured before she could kill herself.[41] Morrison's novel imagines the dead baby returning as a ghost, Beloved, to haunt her mother and family.[42]
Beloved was a critical success and a bestseller for 25 weeks.The New York Times book reviewerMichiko Kakutani wrote that the scene of the mother killing her baby is "so brutal and disturbing that it appears to warp time before and after into a single unwavering line of fate".[43] Canadian writerMargaret Atwood wrote in a review forThe New York Times, "Ms. Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation,Beloved will put them to rest."[44]
Some critics pannedBeloved. African-American conservative social criticStanley Crouch, for instance, complained in his review inThe New Republic[45] that the novel "reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries", and that Morrison "perpetually interrupts her narrative with maudlin ideological commercials".[46][47]
Beloved is the first of three novels about love and African-American history, sometimes called theBeloved Trilogy.[53] Morrison said they are intended to be read together, explaining: "The conceptual connection is the search for the beloved – the part of the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you."[7] The second novel in the trilogy,Jazz, came out in 1992. Told in language that imitates the rhythms of jazz music, the novel is about a love triangle during theHarlem Renaissance in New York City. According toLyn Innes, "Morrison sought to change not just the content and audience for her fiction; her desire was to create stories which could be lingered over and relished, not 'consumed and gobbled as fast food', and at the same time to ensure that these stories and their characters had a strong historical and cultural base."[54]
In 1992, Morrison also published her first book of literary criticism,Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), an examination of the African-American presence in White American literature.[52] (In 2016,Time magazine noted thatPlaying in the Dark was among Morrison's most-assigned texts on U.S. college campuses, together with several of her novels and her 1993Nobel Prize lecture.)[55] Lyn Innes wrote in theGuardian obituary of Morrison, "Her 1990 series of Massey lectures at Harvard were published as Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), and explore the construction of a 'non-white Africanist presence and personae' in the works ofPoe,Hawthorne,Melville,Cather andHemingway, arguing that 'all of us are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes'."[54]
Before the third novel of theBeloved Trilogy was published, Morrison was awarded theNobel Prize in Literature in 1993. The citation praised her as an author "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality".[56] She was the first Black woman of any nationality to win the prize.[57] In her acceptance speech, Morrison said: "We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."[58]
In her Nobel lecture, Morrison talked about the power of storytelling. To make her point, she told a story. She spoke about a blind, old, Black woman who is approached by a group of young people. They demand of her, "Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? ... Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story."[59]
Morrison received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Howard University during its Charter Day celebration in 1995.[60] After the ceremony, she delivered the speech "The First Solution",[61] excerpts of which were later published as an essay titled "Racism and Fascism". The speech discussed the ongoing threat of fascism to democracy, which she said makes inroads through a series of ten steps. ScholarDana A. Williams writes that Morrison lays out the argument that racism "is as much a strategy used to invoke fear and to uphold fabricated hierarchies as fascism."[62]
In 1996, theNational Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for theJefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for "distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities".[63] Morrison's lecture, entitled "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations",[64] began with the aphorism: "Time, it seems, has no future." She cautioned against the misuse of history to diminish expectations of the future.[65] Morrison was also honored with the 1996National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which is awarded to a writer "who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work".[66]
The third novel of herBeloved Trilogy,Paradise, about citizens of an all-Black town, came out in 1997. The following year, Morrison was on the cover ofTime magazine, making her only the second female writer of fiction and second Black writer of fiction to appear on what was perhaps the most significant U.S. magazine cover of the era.[67]
Also in 1998, the movie adaptation ofBeloved was released, directed byJonathan Demme and co-produced byOprah Winfrey, who had spent ten years bringing it to the screen. Winfrey also stars as the main character, Sethe, alongsideDanny Glover as Sethe's lover, Paul D, andThandiwe Newton as Beloved.[68]
The movie flopped at the box office. A review inThe Economist opined that "most audiences are not eager to endure nearly three hours of a cerebral film with an original storyline featuring supernatural themes, murder, rape, and slavery".[69] Film criticJanet Maslin, in herNew York Times review "No Peace from a Brutal Legacy", called it a "transfixing, deeply felt adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel. ... Its linchpin is of course Oprah Winfrey, who had the clout and foresight to bring 'Beloved' to the screen and has the dramatic presence to hold it together."[70] Film criticRoger Ebert suggested thatBeloved was not a genre ghost story but the supernatural was used to explore deeper issues and the non-linear structure of Morrison's story had a purpose.[68]
In 1996, television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey selectedSong of Solomon for her newly launchedBook Club, which became a popular feature on herOprah Winfrey Show.[71] An average of 13 million viewers watched the show's book club segments.[72] As a result, when Winfrey selected Morrison's earliest novelThe Bluest Eye in 2000, it sold another 800,000 paperback copies.[4] John Young wrote in theAfrican American Review in 2001 that Morrison's career experienced the boost of "The Oprah Effect, ... enabling Morrison to reach a broad, popular audience."[73]
Winfrey selected a total of four of Morrison's novels over six years, giving Morrison's works a bigger sales boost than they received from her Nobel Prize win in 1993.[74] The novelist also appeared three times on Winfrey's show. Winfrey said, "For all those who asked the question 'Toni Morrison again?'... I say with certainty there would have been no Oprah's Book Club if this woman had not chosen to share her love of words with the world."[72] Morrison called the book club a "reading revolution".[72]
Morrison continued to explore different art forms, such as providing texts for original scores of classical music. She collaborated withAndré Previn on the song cycleHoney and Rue, which premiered withKathleen Battle in January 1992, and onFour Songs, premiered atCarnegie Hall withSylvia McNair in November 1994. BothSweet Talk: Four Songs on Text andSpirits In the Well (1997) were written forJessye Norman with music byRichard Danielpour, and, alongsideMaya Angelou andClarissa Pinkola Estés, Morrison provided the text for composerJudith Weir'swoman.life.song commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Jessye Norman, which premiered in April 2000.[75][76]
Morrison returned to Margaret Garner's life story, the basis of her novelBeloved, to write thelibretto for a new opera,Margaret Garner. Completed in 2002, with music by Richard Danielpour, the opera was premièred on May 7, 2005, at theDetroit Opera House withDenyce Graves in the title role.[77]Love, Morrison's first novel sinceParadise, came out in 2003. In 2004, she put together a children's book calledRemember to mark the 50th anniversary of theBrown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954 that declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional.[78]
From 1997 to 2003, Morrison was an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large atCornell University.[79]
In 2004, Morrison was invited byWellesley College to deliver thecommencement address, which has been described as "among the greatest commencement addresses of all time and a courageous counterpoint to the entire genre".[80]
In the spring 2006,The New York Times Book Review namedBeloved the best work of American fiction published in the previous 25 years, as chosen by a selection of prominent writers, literary critics, and editors.[82] In his essay about the choice, "In Search of the Best", criticA. O. Scott said: "Any other outcome would have been startling since Morrison's novel has inserted itself into the American canon more completely than any of its potential rivals. With remarkable speed, 'Beloved' has, less than 20 years after its publication, become a staple of the college literary curriculum, which is to say a classic. This triumph is commensurate with its ambition since it was Morrison's intention in writing it precisely to expand the range of classic American literature, to enter, as a living Black woman, the company of dead White males likeFaulkner,Melville,Hawthorne andTwain."[83]
In November 2006, Morrison visited theLouvre museum in Paris as the second in its "Grand Invité" program to guest-curate a month-long series of events across the arts on the theme of "The Foreigner's Home", about whichThe New York Times said: "In tapping her own African-American culture, Ms. Morrison is eager to credit 'foreigners' with enriching the countries where they settle."[84][85][86]
Morrison's novelA Mercy, released in 2008, is set in the Virginia colonies of 1682.Diane Johnson, in her review inVanity Fair, calledA Mercy "a poetic, visionary, mesmerizing tale that captures, in the cradle of our present problems and strains, the natal curse put on us back then by the Indian tribes, Africans, Dutch, Portuguese, and English competing to get their footing in the New World against a hostile landscape and the essentially tragic nature of human experience."[87]
From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held theRobert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities atPrinceton University.[9] She said she did not think much of modern fiction writers who reference their own lives instead of inventing new material, and she used to tell her creative writing students, "I don't want to hear about your little life, OK?" Practicing what she preached, she chose not to write about her own life in a memoir or autobiography.[12]
Though based in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton, Morrison did not regularly offer writing workshops to students after the late 1990s, a fact that earned her some criticism. Rather, she conceived and developed the Princeton Atelier, a program that brings together students with writers and performing artists. Together the students and the artists produce works of art that are presented to the public after a semester of collaboration.[88]
Morrison speaking in 2008
Inspired by her curatorship at the Louvre Museum, Morrison returned to Princeton in the fall 2008 to lead a small seminar, also entitled "The Foreigner's Home".[19]
On November 17, 2017, Princeton University dedicated Morrison Hall (a building previously called West College) in her honor.[89]
Morrison wrote books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison, who was a painter and a musician. Slade died ofpancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, aged 45,[29][91] when Morrison's novelHome (2012) was half-completed.[29]
In May 2011, Morrison received an HonoraryDoctor of Letters degree fromRutgers University–New Brunswick. During the commencement ceremony,[92] she delivered a speech on the "pursuit of life, liberty, meaningfulness, integrity, and truth".
Morrison in 2013
In 2011, Morrison worked with opera directorPeter Sellars andMalian singer-songwriterRokia Traoré onDesdemona, taking a fresh look atWilliam Shakespeare's tragedyOthello. The trio focused on the relationship betweenOthello's wifeDesdemona and her African nursemaid, Barbary, who is only briefly referenced in Shakespeare. The play, a mix of words, music and song, premiered inVienna in 2011.[19][12][93]
Morrison had stopped working on her latest novel when her son died in 2010, later explaining, "I stopped writing until I began to think, He would be really put out if he thought that he had caused me to stop. 'Please, Mom, I'm dead, could you keep going ...?'"[94]
She completedHome and dedicated it to her son Slade.[11][95][96] Published in 2012, it is the story of aKorean War veteran in the segregated United States of the 1950s who tries to save his sister from brutal medical experiments at the hands of a white doctor.[94]
In August 2012,Oberlin College became the home base of the Toni Morrison Society,[97] an international literary society founded in 1993, dedicated to scholarly research of Morrison's work.[98][99][100]
Morrison's eleventh novel,God Help the Child, was published in 2015. It follows Bride, an executive in the fashion and beauty industry whose mother tormented her as a child for being dark-skinned, a trauma that has continued to dog Bride.[101]
Morrison was a member of the editorial advisory board ofThe Nation, a magazine started in 1865 by Northern abolitionists.[78][102]
While teaching at Howard University from 1957 to 1964, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. She took his last name, and became known as Toni Morrison. Their first son, Harold Ford, was born in 1961. She was pregnant when she and Harold divorced in 1964.[8][17][18] Her second son, Slade Kevin Morrison, was born in 1965; he died ofpancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010,[29][91] when Morrison was halfway through writing her novelHome. She stopped work on the novel for a year or two before completing it; it was published in 2012.[103]
Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.[109]
The phrase "our first Black president" was adopted as a positive by Bill Clinton supporters. When theCongressional Black Caucus honored the former president at its dinner in Washington, D.C., on September 29, 2001, for instance, Rep.Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), the chair, told the audience that Clinton "took so many initiatives he made us think for a while we had elected the first black president".[110]
In the context of the2008 Democratic Primary campaign, Morrison stated toTime magazine: "People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race."[111] In theDemocratic primary contest for the2008 presidential race, Morrison endorsed SenatorBarack Obama over SenatorHillary Clinton,[112] though expressing admiration and respect for the latter.[113] When he won, Morrison said she felt like an American for the first time. She said, "I felt very powerfully patriotic when I went to the inauguration of Barack Obama. I felt like a kid."[11]
In April 2015, speaking of the deaths ofMichael Brown,Eric Garner andWalter Scott – three unarmed Black men killed by white police officers – Morrison said: "People keep saying, 'We need to have a conversation about race.' This is the conversation. I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back. And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a Black woman. Then when you ask me, 'Is it over?', I will say yes."[114]
After the 2016 election ofDonald Trump as President of the United States, Morrison wrote an essay, "Mourning for Whiteness", published in the November 21, 2016, issue ofThe New Yorker. In it she argues that white Americans are so afraid of losing privileges afforded them by their race that white voters elected Trump, whom she described as being "endorsed by theKu Klux Klan", in order to keep the idea ofwhite supremacy alive.[115][116]
Although her novels typically concentrate on black women, Morrison did not identify her works asfeminist. When asked in a 1998 interview, "Why distance oneself from feminism?" she replied: "In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book – leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity."[117] She went on to state that she thought it "off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I'm involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don't subscribe to patriarchy, and I don't think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it's a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things."[117]
In 2012, she responded to a question about the difference between black and white feminists in the 1970s. "Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves", she explained. "They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed."[94]
W. S. Kottiswari writes inPostmodern Feminist Writers (2008) that Morrison exemplifies characteristics of "postmodern feminism" by "altering Euro-American dichotomies by rewriting a history written by mainstream historians" and by her usage of shifting narration inBeloved andParadise. Kottiswari states: "Instead of western logocentric abstractions, Morrison prefers the powerful vivid language of women of color ... She is essentially postmodern since her approach to myth and folklore is re-visionist."[118]
Many of Morrison's works have been cited by scholars as significant contributions toBlack feminism, reflecting themes of race, gender, and sexual identity within her narratives.[119]
Barbara Smith's 1977 essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism" argues that Morrison'sSula is a work of Black feminism, as it presents a lesbian perspective that challenges heterosexual relationships and the conventional family unit. Smith states, "Consciously or not, Morrison's work poses both lesbian and feminist questions about Black women's autonomy and their impact upon each other's lives."[120]
Hilton Als's 2003 profile inThe New Yorker notes that "Before the late sixties, there was no real Black Studies curriculum in the academy—let alone a post-colonial-studies program or a feminist one. As an editor and author, Morrison, backed by the institutional power of Random House, provided the material for those discussions to begin."[121]
Morrison consistently advocated for feminist ideas that challenge the dominance of the white patriarchal system, frequently rejecting the notion of writing from the perspective of the "white male gaze".[122] Feminist political activistAngela Davis notes that "Toni Morrison's project resides precisely in the effort to discredit the notion that this white male gaze must be omnipresent."[123]
In a 1998 episode ofCharlie Rose, Morrison responded to a review ofSula, stating, "I remember a review ofSula in which the reviewer said, 'One day, she', meaning me, 'will have to face up 'to the real responsibilities, and get mature, 'and write about the real confrontation 'for black people, which is white people.' As though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the white gaze, and I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books."[124]
In a 2015 interview withThe New York Times Magazine, Morrison reiterated her intention to write without the white gaze, stating, "What I'm interested in is writing without the gaze, without the white gaze. In so many earlier books by African-American writers, particularly the men, I felt that they were not writing to me. But what interested me was the African-American experience throughout whichever time I spoke of. It was always about African-American culture and people – good, bad, indifferent, whatever – but that was, for me, the universe."[5]
Regarding the racial environment in which she wrote, Morrison stated, "Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn't even interesting. I was more interesting than they were. I knew more than they did. And I wasn't afraid to show it."[122]
In a 1986 interview withSandi Russell, Morrison stated that she wrote primarily for Black women, explaining, "I write for black women. We are not addressing the men, as some white female writers do. We are not attacking each other, as both black and white men do. Black women writers look at things in an unforgiving/loving way. They are writing to repossess, re-name, re-own."[125]
In a 2003 interview, when asked about the labels "black" and "female" being attached to her work, Morrison replied, "I can accept the labels because being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn't limit my imagination; it expands it. It's richer than being a white male writer because I know more and I've experienced more."[121]
In a 1987 article inThe New York Times, Morrison argued for the greatness of being a Black woman, stating, "I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither. I really do. So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger."[40]
Zadie Smith, paying tribute to "this infinite terrain" that Morrison opened up to her as a young black woman, wrote in 2019: "Morrison rejected the very concept of the narrow door and claimed for herself the wide world. She enriched our literary inheritance, and now every school child, whatever their background, can inherit Morrison as a literary forebear, a great American writer, who is as available to them—as 'universal'—as any other writer in the canon. All readers and writers are indebted to her for the space she created."[126]
The Toni Morrison Papers are part of the permanent library collections of Princeton University, where they are held in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.[129][130] Morrison's decision to offer her papers to Princeton instead of to her alma mater Howard University was criticized by some within thehistorically black colleges and universities community.[131]
Opening in February 2023, an exhibition titledToni Morrison: Sites of Memory, which was curated from her archives at Princeton University, commemorated the 30th anniversary of her winning the Nobel Prize.[132][133][134] Running from the week after her birthday until June 4, the exhibition featured rare manuscripts, correspondence between Morrison and others, and unfinished projects, taking its name from a 1995 essay by Morrison in which she spoke of a "journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply."[135]
In 2021, Cornell University opened Toni Morrison Hall, a 178,869 square-foot residence hall and Morrison Dining in 2022, an adjacent dining hall designed by ikon.5 Architects.[141][142]
During December 2023, the Toni Morrison Collective at Cornell University to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Morrison'sNobel win partnered with Calvary Baptist Church to give away free copies of two of Morrison's books and hold book talks in various locations. As explained by Anne V. Adams, professor emerita of Africana studies and comparative literature and chair of the Toni Morrison Collective: "The fact that Toni Morrison, during her first year as a master's student, lodged at a house just a couple of doors up the street from historic Calvary Baptist Church created a perfect context for a collaboration."[143]
Morrison was interviewed byMargaret Busby inLondon for a 1988 documentary film by Sindamani Bridglal, entitledIdentifiable Qualities, shown onChannel 4.[144][145]
Morrison was the subject of a film titledImagine – Toni Morrison Remembers, directed byJill Nicholls and shown onBBC One television on July 15, 2015, in which Morrison talked toAlan Yentob about her life and work.[146][147][148]
In 2016, Oberlin College received a grant to complete a documentary film begun in 2014,The Foreigner's Home, about Morrison's intellectual and artistic vision,[149] explored in the context of the 2006 exhibition she guest-curated at the Louvre.[150][151] The film's executive producer wasJonathan Demme.[152] It was directed by Oberlin College Cinema Studies faculty Geoff Pingree and Rian Brown,[153] and incorporates footage shot by Morrison's first-born son Harold Ford Morrison, who also consulted on the film.[154]
A Toni Morrison Treasury: The Big Box; The Ant or the Grasshopper?; The Lion or the Mouse?; Poppy or the Snake?; Peeny Butter Fudge; The Tortoise or the Hare; Little Cloud and Lady Wind; Please, Louise (2023).ISBN9781665915540.
"Recitatif", inAmiri Baraka andAmina Baraka (eds),Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women (1983).[215][216] A standalone hardback edition of the short story, with an introduction byZadie Smith, was published in February 2022 (US: Knopf; UK: Chatto & Windus).[217][218][219]
Foreword,Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. Pantheon Books (1992),ISBN978-0679741459
Co-editor,Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case (1997),ISBN978-0307482266
Goodness and the Literary Imagination: Harvard Divinity School's 95th Ingersoll Lecture: With Essays on Morrison's Moral and Religious Vision. Edited byDavid Carrasco,Stephanie Paulsell, and Mara Willard. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press (2019)
^A remark in her acceptance speech that "there is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby" honoring the memory of the human beings forced into slavery and brought to the United States – "There's no small bench by the road" – led the Toni Morrison Society to begin installing benches at significant sites in the history of slavery in America; the first "bench by the road" was dedicated July 26, 2008, onSullivan's Island, South Carolina, the point of entry for about 40 percent of theenslaved Africans brought toColonial America.[168][169]
^Duvall, John N. (2000).The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 38.ISBN978-0312234027.After all the published biographical information on Morrison agrees that her full name is Chloe Anthony Wofford, so that the adoption of 'Toni' as a substitute for 'Chloe' still honors her given name, if somewhat obliquely. Morrison's middle name, however, was not Anthony; her birth certificate indicates her full name as Chloe Ardelia Wofford, which reveals that Ramah and George Wofford named their daughter for her maternal grandmother, Ardelia Willis.
^abcMote, Dave, ed. (1997). "Toni Morrison".Contemporary Popular Writers. Detroit: St. James Press.ISBN978-1558622166.
^abLarson, Susan (April 11, 2007)."Awaiting Toni Morrison".The Times-Picayune. NOLA.com. Archived fromthe original on September 30, 2007. RetrievedJune 11, 2007.
^Roynon, Tessa (2013).The Cambridge introduction to Toni Morrison. Cambridge introductions to literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University press.ISBN978-1-107-00391-0.
^abGillespie, Carmen (2007).Critical Companion to Toni Morrison: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work. Infobase Publishing. p. 6.ISBN978-1438108575.
^Morrison, Toni, "The Future of Time, Literature and Diminished Expectations," reprinted in Toni Morrison,What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction (University Press of Mississippi, 2008),ISBN978-1604730173, pp. 170–186.
^Alexander, Elizabeth (January 28, 2008)."Our first black president?".Salon. Archived fromthe original on September 13, 2009. RetrievedAugust 9, 2019.It's worth remembering the context of Toni Morrison's famous phrase about Bill Clinton so we can retire it, now that Barack Obama is a contender
^"Honorary Degrees".harvard.edu. Harvard University. Archived fromthe original on October 15, 2019. RetrievedNovember 9, 2016.1989 Benazir Bhutto, Toni Morrison LL.D.
^"Summit Overview Photo".Academy of Achievement. 2007.Hal Prince receives the Golden Plate Award from Awards Council member and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison during the American Academy of Achievement's 2007 Banquet of the Golden Plate gala ceremonies in Washington, D.C.
^"Norton Lectures".Harvard.edu. Harvard University. Archived fromthe original on November 2, 2016. RetrievedNovember 9, 2016.Harvard's preeminent lecture series in the arts and humanities, the Norton Lectures recognize individuals of extraordinary talent who, in addition to their particular expertise, have the gift of wide dissemination and wise expression. The term 'poetry' is interpreted in the broadest sense to encompass all poetic expression in language, music, or the fine arts. Past Norton Professors have includedT. S. Eliot,Jorge Luis Borges,Leonard Bernstein,Czesław Miłosz,John Cage, andNadine Gordimer. The Norton Professor in 2016 is Toni Morrison.
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