Toni Morrison
American novelist and editor awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Toni Morrison, born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, was the second of four children in a working-class Black family. Her father, a welder for U.S. Steel, had moved north from Georgia after witnessing the lynching of two Black businessmen, an event that left him deeply traumatized and distrustful of white people. When Morrison was about two years old, her family’s landlord set their home on fire because her parents could not pay rent; her family responded by laughing at the landlord, a reaction Morrison later cited as a lesson in maintaining integrity against cruelty. Her parents nurtured her sense of heritage through African-American folktales, ghost stories, and songs, and she read voraciously, favoring authors like Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. At age twelve, she converted to Catholicism and took the baptismal name Anthony, which led to the nickname Toni. In high school, she participated in debate, yearbook, and drama. She graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English and a minor in Classics, having studied theatre and worked with Harlem Renaissance figures. She earned a master’s degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955, writing her thesis on alienation in Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. After teaching at Texas Southern University and Howard, she married Harold Morrison in 1958, had two sons, and divorced in 1964. In the late 1960s, she became the first Black female senior editor in fiction at Random House, where she championed Black literature, editing works by writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Gayl Jones. Her own writing career flourished in the 1970s and 1980s, with novels like *Sula* (1973) and *Recitatif* (1983) joining her acclaimed works. *Beloved* was adapted into a film in 1998. Morrison received numerous honors, including the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2020.
- born
- February 18, 1931
- died
- August 5, 2019
- field
- Novelist, editor
- nationality
- American
- known_for
- Nobel Prize in Literature (1993), Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1988)
Verified Timeline
Lore & Background
Morrison's novel *Song of Solomon* (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, she won the Pulitzer Prize for *Beloved* (1987), which was made into a film in 1998. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama on May 29, 2012, and was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020. The National Endowment for the Humanities selected her for the Jefferson Lecture in 1996, and she was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year. She also received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016.
Reader's Guide
As an editor at Random House, she became the first Black female editor for fiction in the late 1960s, championing works by Black writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Henry Dumas, and compiling *The Black Book* (1974), an anthology of Black life in the United States. Her novels, including *The Bluest Eye* (1970), *Sula* (1973), *Song of Solomon* (1977), and *Beloved* (1987), are noted for their precise prose and exploration of racism's harsh consequences. Morrison's legacy is cemented by major honors: the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993), the Pulitzer Prize for *Beloved* (1988), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012), and the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (1996). Her induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020 further underscores her enduring impact on literature and American culture.
Did You Know?
- Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, and became a Catholic at age 12, taking the baptismal name Anthony, which led to her nickname Toni.
- Her first novel, *The Bluest Eye*, was published in 1970 when she was 39 years old, and she wrote it by getting up every morning at 4 am while raising two children on her own.
- As an editor at Random House, she brought to publication the 1975 autobiography of Muhammad Ali, *The Greatest: My Own Story*.
- Morrison's novel *Song of Solomon* (1977) was the first novel by a Black writer to be a main selection of the Book of the Month Club since Richard Wright's *Native Son* in 1940.
- Her master's thesis at Cornell University was titled 'Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's treatment of the alienated.'
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