Toni Morrison

Novelist, essayist, librettist, book editor, teacher, scholar, and public intellectual, Toni Morrison was a major contributor to contemporary understandings of the enduring and complex roles of race, sexuality, gender, and class in shaping American experience and identity. Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on 18 February 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, where she grew up with parents, George and Ramah Wofford, an older sister, and two younger brothers. After high school she attended Howard University, where she took on the name Toni. In 1953 she was graduated with a BA in English and two years later earned an MA from Cornell. In the nine years that followed, Morrison spent two teaching English at Texas Southern University before returning to Howard as an instructor. During this period, she married Harold Morrison and gave birth to two sons. In 1964 the marriage ended in divorce, and Morrison moved to New York to begin a nearly twenty-year tenure at Random House, first at the textbook subsidiary in Syracuse and then at the trade division in New York City. There she published Angela Davis, Henry Dumas, Toni Cade Bambara, Mohammad Ali, Gayle Jones, and other writers whose time had come, she thought. “I made it my business,” she once said of her work as an editor, “to collect African Americans who were vocal, either politically, or just writing wonderful fiction.” At Random House, Morrison also began publishing her own stories, writing the kind of books she says she wanted to read. The Bluest Eye appeared in 1970, although she began it much earlier as a young wife and mother in a writing group. It was out of print by 1974 but has since been reprinted and is now considered a masterwork. Ten novels followed: Sula (1973); Song of Solomon (1977); Tar Baby (1981); a trilogy, Beloved 1987, Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998); Love (2003); A Mercy (2008); Home (2012); and God Help the Child (2015). Morrison spoke of her early stories as “evolutionary. One comes out of the other.” Later novels, too, have evolved from and toward a continuing (de)construction of America’s story of race. Over the years, as Morrison’s fiction unfolded, so did her involvement in the academy and civil conversations. She held several visiting professorships, and in 1989 she joined Princeton’s faculty as the Robert F. Goheen Professor of the Humanities where she continued until 2006. Her essays and lectures on critical theory and culture are morally imaginative, encouraging new thinking about social power and public narrative in America. For her many contributions Morrison received high praise and a number of awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon, a Pulitzer Prize for Beloved, and for her collective achievements the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993. The Swedish Academy recognized her as one who, “in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” In 2010, Morrison was inducted into the Legion of Honour, France’s highest order of merit. Two years later, President Barack Obama awarded her the nation’s top civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom; the following year she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for achievement in American Fiction. Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at Montefiore Medical Center in New York from complications of pneumonia. She was eight-eight.