Morrison became the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
It was later made into a film starring Oprah Winfrey in 1998.īeloved won Morrison the Pulitzer, and a slew of other major awards soon followed. The book made Morrison a major national literary figure. But Morrison’s best known work is the 1987 book Beloved, which narrated the tribulations of a 19th-century runaway slave, who kills her baby daughter. It brought Morrison critical acclaim, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award. Song of Solomon, published in 1977, followed the life of an African-American man in Michigan. Her first book, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970, told through the eyes of a black girl, who begs God for blue eyes. Writing was something for me to do in the evenings, after the children were asleep.’ In a 1979 interview with the New York Times, Morrison described how in Syracuse in 1965, she began to write seriously: ‘I had two small children in a strange place and I was very lonely. In her pursuit of a novel freed from the dominance of the white gaze, Morrison turned to her own writing in earnest. She shaped a new literary canon as a champion of writers of colour, publishing authors including Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali and Henry Dumas.
She became the first female African-American editor at Random House, where she worked from 1967 to 1983. In 1965, a year on from her divorce, she moved to upstate New York to work as an editor. She married the architect Howard Morrison and had two sons. Her parents bore witness to the naked racism of the American south – in particular, Morrison’s father, George Wofford, a shipyard welder, who witnessed the lynching of two men, would hold a distrust of white people for the rest of his life.Īfter studying English at Howard University (where she took up the name Toni) and graduate work at Cornell where she wrote a thesis on William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, Morrison returned to Washington DC to teach. Morrison wove African American voices and experiences – from the history of slavery to the violence that continued – into the fabric of American literary life, both as an editor and also an author of 11 novels over five decades.īorn Chloe Ardelia Wofford in 1931, she grew up in a working-class family in the steel-working Ohio town of Lorain. Her family confirmed ‘with profound sadness’ that Morrison had passed away on the night of Monday 5 August ‘following a short illness’. Courtesy: Getty Images photograph: Sebastien Micke/Contourīeloved author and Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison has died at the age of 88.