Toni Morrison, born Chloe Ardelia Wofford (February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), was an American novelist, editor, essayist, teacher, and professor. She was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Her work examined the Black experience, especially the Black female experience, in American culture of the past and present.

At right, Morrison’s author portrait from her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Morrison was born and raised in Lorain, Ohio in a working-class African-American family. They influenced her immense love and appreciation for Black culture as she grew up hearing folktales, songs, and storytelling. Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy were two of her favorite authors. 

As the second oldest of four children, Morrison was well aware of the issues that her family faced because of their race. When her father lived in Cartersville Georgia as a teenager, he witnessed two Black businessmen who lived on his street get lynched by white people.

Morrison said “He never told us that he’d seen bodies. But he had seen them. And that was too traumatic, I think, for him.” 

At the age of two, her house was set on fire by the family’s landlord while they inside because her parents were unable to pay rent. Rather than getting extremely angry, Morrison’s mother simply laughed at the landlord, calling his actions a “bizarre form of evil.”

It was from that moment that Morrison became aware of her family’s ability to remain calm and not let racial bias get the best of them. 

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Morrison became a member of the Catholic church at the age of twelve and chose the baptismal name of Anthony. This led to the use of her nickname, Toni. She earned her degree from Howard University in 1953 and then attended graduate school at Cornell University.

After teaching at Texas Southern University for two years, she taught English at Howard University from 1957 to 1964. During this time, she was married to Harold Morrison, an architect from Jamaica who also taught at Howard, and had two children. They divorced in 1964. 

In 1965, Morrison began working as a fiction editor at Random House in their Syracuse, New York office. After two years, she transferred to Random House in New York City, becoming the first Black woman senior editor of fiction.

In this role, Morrison brought Black literature into the mainstream with the compilation of Contemporary African Literature (1972). She discovered the writings of African-American writers that are widely read and respected today, including Angela Davis, Gayl Jones, and Toni Cade Bambara.

Her impact as an editor, in terms of its contributions to contemporary Black literature, can’t be understated. An analysis by Arielle Grey titled “Toni Morrison as an Editor Changed Book Publishing Forever” states:

“If there was one thing Morrison had as both an editor and a writer, it was range. From fiction to nonfiction to anthologies, the books she edited and published went out into the world and forever changed it.

Collections like Contemporary African Literature and her own The Black Book became bedrock texts for the Black studies field that began to emerge in the 1960s. She guided the works of other Black writers and tended to the soil that was needed to seed a movement. All the while, she was ascending to fame as a writer in her own right.”

The Bluest Eye (1970) is the story of an African-American girl who dreams of having blue eyes to fit into Western beauty standards. Though it didn’t sell well at first, it made its way onto the book lists of Black studies courses at the university level which helped boost its visibility. 

Morrison’s second novel, Sula (1974), examines the various dynamics of friendships and the expectation to conform to a community’s standards. It was extremely popular and was nominated for the National Book Award. 

Her third novel was by far the most popular of her early works. Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national praise and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was also awarded the Book of the Month Club and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. 

Tar Baby (1981), her next novel, tells the story of Jadine, a fashion model who is obsessed with her looks and falls in love with a poor drifter who is comfortable in his dark skin. Along with this powerful novel, she also worked on her first play about Emmett Till, Dreaming Emmett, who was murdered by white men in 1955. 

In the years to follow, Morrison went on the publish more books that explore issues dealing with race, class, and sex. This next group of books included Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1997).

While working on these novels, she was also a writer-in-residence at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and then at Albany. She moved to Princeton University in 1989. 

While working as a professor at Princeton, she brought out Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). After creating so many notable books, she was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

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The Nobel Prize in Literature 

Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, making her the first African-American woman to be selected for the award. Typical of the high praise she received was that she “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” 

Upon receiving the award, she discussed the power of storytelling and spoke about a blind old Black woman who is approached by a group of young people who ask, “Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? … Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story.”

 

Themes in Morrison’s writing

The central theme of Morrison’s novels is the portrayal of the Black American experience. Morrison used her characters to show readers the struggles that Black people face, finding themselves and their cultural identity. Her characters seek to understand the unfortunate truth of the world while uncovering love, beauty, friendship, death, and more. 

Morrison employed a poetic style and provoke strong emotional responses from her audience. She occasionally included a bit of fantasy to imbue her stories with texture and power. 

 

Other Awards and Honors

In 1979, Morrison was awarded Barnard College’s highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction, during their commencement ceremony. 

Beloved (1987), based on the true story of a runaway slave, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. A film adaptation of the novel was released in 1998 and starred Oprah Winfrey. 

In 1996, she received a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. 

In 1997, Morrison appeared on the cover of Time magazine. She was the second female writer of fiction and African-American writer to appear on America’s most significant magazine cover of the era.

In 2001, she was given the National Arts and Humanities Award by former President Bill Clinton in Washington, D.C. Upon giving the award, the president said that Morrison had “entered America’s heart.”

In 2005, Morrison won the Coretta Scott King Award for her novel Remember (2004), which delved into the struggles of Black students during the time of integration amongst America’s public school system. 

She was made an officer of the French Legion of Honour in 2010 and was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. 

In 2017, Princeton University changed the name of a building, previously known as West College. It was changed to Morrison Hall. 

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In 2011, Morrison worked with directors Peter Sellars, Malian, and Rokia Traoreon on a production called Desdemona, which takes a fresh look at William Shakespeare’s Othello. The production premiered in Vienna in 2011. 

When Morrison’s son Slade died, she had stopped working on her latest novel. She decided to start writing again because she thought her son would be upset if he knew that he was the reason she stopped writing. “Please, Mom, I’m dead, could you keep going … ?” she thought he would say. She completed her novel, Home, in 2012 and dedicated it to her son. 

On August 5, 2019, the legendary Toni Morrison passed away at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, New York City, from complications of pneumonia. She was eighty-eight years old.

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Toni Morrison in 2019 (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
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