Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio in 1931, the second of four children. Her father worked multiple jobs simultaneously — welding, car washing, whatever was available — and her family's relationship to the Great Migration, to Southern Black culture carried north, and to the experience of being Black in a mid-century Midwestern steel town gave her the material she would spend her career working. She took the name Toni at Howard University, where she studied English and performed with the Howard University Players. She went on to a master's degree at Cornell, writing a thesis on William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf — both would remain touchstones — and returned to Howard to teach.

She moved to New York in 1965 to work as an editor at Random House, where she remained for 18 years. Her editorial work was politically serious: she championed The Black Book (1974), a documentary scrapbook of African American history; she edited Angela Davis's autobiography, Muhammad Ali's autobiography, and the fiction of Gayl Jones. She was doing this while writing her own novels, raising two children as a single mother after her marriage ended, and editing textbooks for a Random House subsidiary. The first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970; she was nearly 40.

The Bluest Eye is about an eleven-year-old Black girl in 1940s Ohio who prays to have blue eyes, to be white, to be beautiful in the only terms her world validates. It is a brutal book, formally sophisticated, narrated by multiple voices with a Dick-and-Jane primer serving as ironic counterpoint. Sula (1973) follows two Black women across decades. Song of Solomon (1977) won the National Book Critics Circle Award and brought her to national prominence; it is structurally her most ambitious early novel, tracing a Black man's search for his family's history back through slavery and flight.

Beloved (1987) is the central text. It is based on the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who escaped Kentucky in 1856, was captured in Ohio, and killed her infant daughter rather than see her returned to slavery. Morrison found the story in a newspaper clipping included in The Black Book. The novel is about Sethe, a woman living in Ohio in 1873 who is haunted — literally, by the ghost of her murdered daughter, who takes physical form and calls herself Beloved. It is a ghost story, a historical novel about the psychic aftermath of slavery, and a meditation on the nature of memory and the cost of survival. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. In 1987, 48 Black writers and critics signed an open letter in the New York Times Book Review protesting the fact that Beloved had not won the National Book Award — a public act of advocacy for a living writer that has no real precedent in American literary history.

She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the first Black American to do so. Her Nobel lecture — about an old blind woman, a bird, and the relationship between language and power — is as good a statement on those subjects as exists in prose. She taught at Princeton from 1989 to 2006. A Mercy (2008), set in 17th-century colonial America before slavery was fully codified, is among her most controlled later works. She died in 2019 at 88.