TONI MORRISON - NOBEL PRIZE- AND PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING WRITER

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorraine, Ohio, on February 18, 1931. She was the second of four children and raised in a working-class family. Early on, Morrison showed an interest in literature. Storytelling was an influential part of her childhood.

After high school, Morrison enrolled at Howard University to study humanities. She earned a Master’s of Arts degree in English from Cornell University in 1955. Morrison taught at Texas Southern University and Howard University until 1964. In 1965, she became the first African American female fiction editor at Random House in New York City. 

In 1970, Morrison published her first book, The Bluest Eye, a novel about a Black girl obsessed by white beauty standards and longs to have blue eyes.

Morrison’s second published work, Sula, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, examines the dynamics of friendship and the expectations for conformity within a community.

Her third novel, Song of Solomon, about a man searching for his identity, was published in 1977 and brought Morrison to national attention.

In 1987, Morrison’s critically acclaimed Beloved, based on a true story of a runaway slave, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Oprah Winfrey starred in the film adaptation of the novel in 1998. The NY Times called the book “The best work of American fiction of the past twenty-five years.”

With their richly-expressive depictions of Black America and poetic writing style, Morrison’s many works earned her the Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first Black woman to do so.

From 1989-2006, Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University. She died in 2019 from complications of pneumonia. She was 88 years old. In honor of her contribution to literature, Ohio legislated February 18th as Toni Morrison Day.

For more information about Toni Morrison, visit:

https://www.biography.com/writer/toni-morrison

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Toni-Morrison