Toni Morrison was an award-winning American novelist known for her richly-detailed explorations of the frequently painful and unjust experiences of Black people. Her fantasy, magical realism, and poetic style give life to characters who find themselves in a society where they often feel bereft.
Morrison lived from 1931 to 2019 and wrote 11 novels, seven children’s books, a number of short fiction works, non-fiction commentary, plays, and poetry. Her novel, Song of Solomon was critically acclaimed and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and in 1993, she became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford to a working-class family in Loraine, Ohio. She used her baptismal name, Anthony, or Toni. She loved to read as a child, and her parents instilled in her a sense of heritage with storytelling, songs, ghost stories, and African American folktales. She attended Howard University and Cornell University and after several years spent teaching, became a Fiction Editor at Random House in 1965. This is also when she began writing.
The success of her first three books, The Bluest Eye, Sula, and The Song of Solomon, encouraged Morrison to leave publishing and pursue writing full time. Her books were critical and commercial successes and regularly appeared on The New York Times best-seller list for months at a time. Her books were also featured multiple times in Oprah Winfrey’s book club and are the subject of countless critical studies.
Morrison was awarded several honorary doctorates. She was also honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 and was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2020. A documentary about her life and career, “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am,” was released in 2019.