Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was born to an African American family who moved to Ohio during the Great Migration. She said that her father’s experiences of Southern racism led him to vocally resent white people. He taught the young Morrison stories from the African American folktale tradition, which she learned alongside classics of the Western literary canon. Morrison received her BA from Howard University and her MA from Cornell, eventually returning to teach at Howard after a stint at Texas Southern University. She married the Jamaican architect Harold Morrison, with whom she had two children before the couple divorced. It was not until she was 30 and raising two children in addition to working as a professor and editor that Morrison first began writing. She joined a writers’ group at Howard, where she workshopped a story that eventually became her critically-acclaimed first novel, The Bluest Eye, published in 1970. Some of Morrison’s most famous works include Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved. She is one of the most widely-read American writers and arguably the most famous African American female author. She was also the first African American person to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, which she was awarded in 1993. Morrison’s work explores themes of race, gender, sexuality, and the family, and it often features the perspectives of children. She was unafraid of broaching controversial themes, such as incest, rape, and—in the famous case of Beloved—a child’s murder by her own mother. While her writing often exposes the sinister side of human nature, Morrison also left space for forgiveness, redemption, and optimism. Morrison died in 2019, at the age of 88, of complications from pneumonia.