Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the first Black woman to receive it, and spent her career writing for an audience she did not have to explain herself to. Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio in 1931 into a working-class family that had left the South, she grew up hearing folktales and ghost stories from her parents. She studied at Howard and Cornell, taught, married and divorced the architect Harold Morrison, and raised two sons alone. She spent nearly twenty years as an editor at Random House, where she published Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali and Toni Cade Bambara and assembled The Black Book, a documentary history — work she regarded as changing the canon from inside the industry. She began writing at night. The Bluest Eye, published in 1970 when she was thirty-nine, follows a Black girl who prays for blue eyes, and sold badly at first. Sula, Song of Solomon and Tar Baby followed. Beloved, published in 1987, was based on Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery in 1856 and killed her own daughter rather than see her recaptured. The novel is narrated partly by the dead child and refuses any comfortable reading of what slavery did. It won the Pulitzer Prize after forty-eight writers protested its initial omission. Her prose combines the vernacular she grew up with, biblical cadence and non-linear structure, and she stated repeatedly that she wrote without the white gaze — not explaining, not translating. She taught at Princeton and died in 2019.

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