Toni Morrison was a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist. She was the first Black Woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio to
George and Ramah Wofford. Her parents had moved to Ohio to escape southern racism and taught their children about their heritage through traditional African American folktales, stories and songs. They also nurtured her love of reading and music.
Morrison lived in an integrated neighbourhood and was not aware of racial divisions until she was in her teens. In first grade, she was “the only black in the class and the only child who could read,” and never felt like her peers thought her anything but equal. She graduated from Lorain High School with honors in 1949.
Morrison continued her education at Howard University, where she pursued her interest in literature, majoring in English and minoring in the classics. After graduating in 1953 she attended Cornell university where she wrote her thesis on the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. She completed her master’s degree in 1955 and moved to Texas to teach English at Texas Southern University. She also began using the name Toni.
In 1957, Morrison returned to Howard University to teach English and met Harold Morrison, an architect originally from Jamaica. The couple married in 1958 and in 1961, had their first child. That same year, Morrison joined a writers group on campus and began writing fiction. One of her short stories was about a black girl who longed to have blue eyes. It would later become her first novel, The Bluest Eye.
In 1963, Morrison left Howard and spent time travelling in Europe with her family, on her return to the U.S. her husband decided to move back to Jamaica and in 1964 they divorced. Morrison moved back to Lorain, Ohio with her two sons and a year later, she moved to Syracuse, New York. Morrison worked for a textbook publisher as a senior editor before later moving to Random House in New York City as senior trade-book editor. Morrison was able to play a vital role in bringing black literature into the mainstream. She edited books by Henry Dumas, Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Gayl Jones.
In 1970, The Bluest Eye was published, it told the story of a victimised adolescent black girl who is obsessed by white standards of beauty and longs to have blue eyes, believing them to be the solution to her problems. She followed this in 1973 with Sula, which dealt with the idea of good and evil through the friendship of two women and the expectations for conformity within the community. She wrote the book while teaching at the State University of New York at Purchase. It was nominated for the American Book Award.
In 1976 – 1977 Morrison taught at Yale while working on her next novel. Song of Solomon was published in 1977 and became the first work by an African-American author to be a featured selection in the book-of-the-month club since Native Son by Richard Wright. Morrison received a number of awards for the novel including the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1980, she was appointed to the National Council on the Arts. Morrison followed Song of Solomon with Tar Baby, drawing inspiration from folktales, and Beloved in 1987. Beloved became a critical success, it explored love and the supernatural and focused on a former slave who is haunted by her decision to kill her children instead of see them become slaves. After the book did not win the National Book Award as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, 48 black critics and writers protested the decision. Not long after this incident, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the American Book Award. It later became a movie starring Oprah Winfrey.
Morrison continued to teach until her retirement in 2006. She held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University from 1989 to 2006, The position made her the first African American woman writer to hold a named chair at any of the Ivy League universities.
In 1993, she received the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first African-American woman to be selected for the award. Morrison continues to create great works of literature dealing with the black American experience and the unjust society in which her characters must struggle to find themselves and their cultural identity. She is unafraid to speak up about that unjust society, in 2015, after the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Walter Scott she said that “People keep saying, ‘We need to have a conversation about race.’ This is the conversation. I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back. And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, ‘Is it over?’, I will say yes.”
Morrison has received many awards for her work and contribution to literature including the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which is awarded to a writer “who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work.” She has also been awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. and been made an officer of the French Legion of Honour.