Toni Morrison, author, editor, professor and preeminent literary voice

Toni Morrison (February 18, 1931-August 5, 2019) was an author, editor, teacher, professor, and a defining voice of the African-American experience, who received almost every major literary accolade. She was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, to George Wofford, a welder, and Ramah Willis Wofford, a domestic worker.

In 1953, Morrison received a B.A. in English from Howard University, and, in 1955, a master’s degree from Cornell University. She began her teaching career at Texas Southern University, and, in 1957, she began teaching at her alma mater, Howard University. She was married to architect Harold Morrison from 1958 to 1964, and they became the parents of two sons. In 1965, she took a job with L.W. Singer, the textbook imprint of Random House in Syracuse, N.Y., transferring to the publisher’s New York City offices two years later, and becoming the fiction department’s first African-American female senior editor. In that capacity, Morrison championed bringing black literature and authors into the mainstream.

Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, which she developed from a short story, was published in 1970. As a single mother raising two sons, she rose at 4 a.m. to work on the manuscript. Her 1973 novel, Sula, was nominated for the National Book Award, and her third, Song of Solomon, won the 1977 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her first play, Dreaming Emmett, about the brutal murder of African-American teenager Emmett Till, was performed in 1986.

The following year, she published Beloved, the first novel of what would become a trilogy. The book spent 25 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The second novel in the trilogy, Jazz, was published in 1992, the same year that her first book of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, was also released. The following year, she became the first black woman from any nation to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities distinguished her with the Jefferson Lecture, the federal government’s highest intellectual honor; her lecture topic was “The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations.” The same year, she received the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters; in 1997, she released Paradise, the third novel in her trilogy. The first book in the trilogy, Beloved, became a motion picture in 1998, following her introduction to the general public by Oprah Winfrey, who also starred in the film.

In addition to continuing to teach and hold chairs at various universities, Morrison wrote a libretto for the opera, Margaret Garner, based on the real life inspiration for Beloved and wrote a children’s book, Remember, based on the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that outlawed racial segregation in public schools. In 2005, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best work of American fiction in the last 25 years. Three years later, her next novel, A Mercy, was published. She wrote several children’s books with her late son, Slade Morrison, and, in 2011, collaborated on the opera, Desdemona, a retelling of Shakespeare’s play, Othello, from the point of view of his wife and her African nursemaid. The novel, Home, was released in 2012; that same year, President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  Her last novel, God Help the Child, was published in 2015.