Morrison, Toni

Born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, as Chloe Ardelia Wofford, the woman who is now Toni Morrison has experienced a life of great depth, length, and breadth—ranging from working as a housekeeper at age 12 to winning the Nobel Prize in Literature when she was 62. Extraordinarily, now 87 years old, Morrison has continued to write. She was named Woman of the Year by Ladies Home Journal in 2002 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2012. But what stands out the most are her books. In writing challenging novels about abused children, ghosts, enslaved mothers, bankers, beauty-supply salesmen, hoteliers, veterans, nuns, fashion models, and child brides, Morrison dives deeply into black culture, black history, and black love. While fulfilling her primary goal of bearing witness for her target audience, African American readers, her novels also provide readers of other races rich and varied glimmers of understanding into African American life, history, and culture. Morrison’s works are brave, unvarnished, direct, gutsy, earthy, and true. Her oeuvre includes eleven novels; nine children’s books; several books of analysis, literary reaction, and cultural critique; one libretto; one book of poems, one short story; one published play; one unpublished play; dozens of essays; and numerous edited books. Her most acclaimed novel, Beloved, was published in 1987 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. Ten year later, in 1998, it was adapted as a movie produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey. Her most obscure work may be the co-authored College Reading Skills, published in 1965. In addition to becoming an acclaimed author, Morrison has been an accomplished editor, a university professor at Princeton and Harvard, and she has been a guest curator at the Louvre in Paris. She has a brilliant mind, an irreverent sense of humor, and a youthful sense of self, having said on more than one occasion that even at her age she feels exactly 23 years old inside. With her former husband, Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect whom she married in 1958 and divorced in 1964, she birthed two sons, Harold Ford, an architect, and Slade Kevin, an artist who died of cancer in 2010. She has two granddaughters, Nidal and Safa, and a daughter-in-law, Cecilia Rouse, who worked in the Obama White House. Now in her 80s, she is long retired from teaching. Because of back trouble, she is mostly wheelchair bound, but she is thinking clearly, and she is writing, with at least two more books in the works—a book of essays as well as her twelfth novel, tentatively titled Justice. While some have called her the “conscience of America,” she manages to be simultaneously regal and down-to-earth, and she still calls herself “Chloe.” Toni Morrison is all of these things and more; she and her esteemed novels and nonfiction demonstrate the breadth of her varied interest as an artist and as one of America’s most important public intellectuals.