Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, an industrial town on Lake Erie, into a working-class family that passed on folktales, ghost stories and songs. Her father had left Georgia after witnessing racial violence there. She studied English at Howard University and took a master’s degree at Cornell, taught for some years, and in the late 1960s became a fiction editor at Random House in New York, where she championed Black writers while writing fiction of her own.

The Bluest Eye (1970), about a girl who longs for blue eyes, set out her lasting concerns: the damage done by a culture’s idea of beauty, the bonds and betrayals of community, the weight of what goes unspoken. Sula and Song of Solomon followed, the latter bringing national recognition. Beloved (1987), drawn from the history of a woman who escaped slavery and killed her child rather than see her returned to it, won the Pulitzer Prize and became her best-known work. Her prose moves between the vernacular and the incantatory, and she was as attentive to music and myth as to history.

In 1993 she became the first Black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. She taught at Princeton for many years, published essays on race and the American imagination, including Playing in the Dark, and continued to write novels into her eighties. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 and died in New York in 2019.