Toni Morrison (1931 - 2019) was an American novelist, essayist, editor and professor whose fiction examined the inner lives of Black Americans with a density of language drawn from oral storytelling. [1] Her novels include The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. [2] In 1993 she became the first African American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. [3]
Early life and education
Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, on 18 February 1931, she grew up in an integrated steel-mill town during the Depression in a family that had migrated north from Alabama and Georgia. Her parents told folk tales and ghost stories at home, a tradition she later credited as the foundation of her prose. [1]
She graduated from Lorain High School and went on to Howard University, where she took a degree in English in 1953 and adopted the name Toni. She completed a master's degree at Cornell University in 1955 with a thesis on suicide in the work of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, then taught at Texas Southern University and at Howard.
Editing and first novels
In 1965 Morrison joined the publisher L. W. Singer, later moving to Random House in New York, where she became a senior editor. Over nearly two decades there she brought a generation of Black writers into mainstream publishing, editing work by Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali, and assembling The Black Book (1974), a documentary scrapbook of African American history. [2]
She wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), in the early mornings while working full time and raising two sons alone. It tells the story of a young Black girl who longs for blue eyes, and it introduced the concerns - internalised racism, beauty standards, community complicity - that run through her later work. Sula followed in 1973, and Song of Solomon (1977) won the National Book Critics Circle Award and established her national reputation.
Beloved and mature work
Tar Baby appeared in 1981, and in 1987 Morrison published Beloved, inspired by the case of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who killed her own child rather than see her returned to slavery. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 after a public letter from dozens of Black writers protested its earlier omission from major awards. [2]
Beloved became the first volume of a trilogy completed by Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998). Her later novels include Love, A Mercy, Home and God Help the Child (2015). She also wrote criticism, notably Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), which argued that the presence of Africanist figures shaped canonical American writing even where race was unspoken. [1]
Teaching, honours and legacy
Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Professorship in the Humanities at Princeton University from 1989 until her retirement in 2006, where she founded the Princeton Atelier to bring artists and students together. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the National Humanities Medal in 2000, France's Legion of Honour, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. [3]
She also wrote children's books with her son Slade Morrison, libretti and a play, Dreaming Emmett. Morrison died in the Bronx, New York, on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight. Her novels are among the most widely taught works in American schools and universities, and have also been recurrent targets of book-banning campaigns. [1]
