Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was an American novelist and editor whose work brought the Black American experience, and the harsh consequences of racism in the United States, to the center of modern literature. She was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, west of Cleveland, the second of four children in a working-class Black family. She died on August 5, 2019. Over the course of her life, she became one of the most honored writers of her time, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Morrison’s early life gave her a deep sense of language, history, and survival. Her mother, Ramah Willis Wofford, was a homemaker and a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Her father, George Wofford, had grown up in Georgia and moved north after witnessing the aftermath of a lynching in his neighborhood. When Morrison was about two, her family’s landlord set fire to their house while they were inside because her parents could not pay the rent. Morrison later remembered that her family laughed at the landlord rather than giving in to despair, a response she saw as a way to keep integrity and claim one’s own life. Her parents also filled the home with African-American folktales, ghost stories, and songs. As a child, she read often, with Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy among her favorite authors.

At 12, she became Catholic and took the baptismal name Anthony, after Anthony of Padua, which led to the nickname Toni. She attended Lorain High School, where she joined the debate team, the yearbook staff, and the drama club. In 1949, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., seeking the company of fellow Black intellectuals. At Howard, she first studied drama, later graduated with a B.A. in English and a minor in Classics, and worked with figures connected to the Harlem Renaissance era, including Alain Locke and Sterling Brown. She also traveled the Deep South with the Howard Players, an experience described as defining in her life. She earned a master’s degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955.

Before becoming known as a novelist, Morrison taught English at Texas Southern University and Howard University, married Harold Morrison in 1958, and had two children before their divorce in 1964. After the birth of her son Slade in 1965, she began working as an editor for L. W. Singer, a textbook division of Random House, in Syracuse. Two years later, she moved to Random House in New York City, where she became the company’s first Black woman senior editor in the fiction department. In that role, she helped bring Black literature to a wider readership, working on books by or about figures such as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Athol Fugard, Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, Huey Newton, Gayl Jones, Muhammad Ali, and Henry Dumas. She also developed and edited The Black Book, a 1974 anthology of Black life in the United States from slavery to the 1920s.

Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. Song of Solomon, published in 1977, brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved, first published in 1987 and made into a film in 1998. Honors continued to follow: the Jefferson Lecture in 1996, the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters that same year, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2012, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. Morrison was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2020. Her words still resonate because they come from close attention to pain, beauty, memory, and freedom. As one quote often shared from her says, “If you want to fly, give up everything that weighs you down.”