Toni Morrison
Chloe Ardelia Wofford, who wrote under the name Toni Morrison, was born on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, the second of four children of George Wofford, a shipyard welder, and Ramah Willis Wofford. She grew up in a working-class family in which African American cultural traditions — storytelling, music, community — were lived realities rather than abstractions, and these traditions would become the bedrock of her literary art. She attended Howard University, where she changed her name to Toni, and earned a master’s degree in English from Cornell University with a thesis on William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. After teaching at Texas Southern University and Howard, she joined the publishing house Random House in 1967, where she became a senior editor and, over the next two decades, played a crucial role in bringing the work of major Black writers — including Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Gayl Jones — to publication.
Morrison began writing fiction in her thirties, working on her debut novel while raising two sons alone after the end of her marriage. The Bluest Eye (1970) announced an entirely original literary voice: a novel about a Black girl in Ohio who prays for blue eyes, believing that whiteness is the precondition of beauty and worth, written in a prose that was both rigorously modernist in its formal complexity and deeply rooted in African American oral and musical traditions. It was followed by Sula (1973) and then Song of Solomon (1977), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and became the first novel by a Black American author to be a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection since Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940.
Beloved, published in 1987, is the novel on which Morrison’s claim to literary greatness most firmly rests and is widely regarded as one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century. Based on the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who killed her own infant daughter rather than allow her to be returned to slavery, the novel follows Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman in post-Civil War Ohio, who is haunted — literally — by the ghost of her dead child. Beloved confronts the psychic legacy of slavery with an unflinching moral courage and a formal brilliance that few novels have matched. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. Song of Solomon, also on the site, is an equally celebrated work tracing a Black man’s journey to recover his family’s buried history, suffused with folklore, flight, and the magic of recovered identity.
Morrison’s prose style is one of the most distinctive and powerful in American literature. It draws on the rhythms of Black speech and music — call and response, repetition, the communal voice — while employing the full range of modernist technique: fractured chronology, multiple perspectives, the blurring of the boundary between the living and the dead. Her sentences carry the weight of history and the force of prophecy, and her narrative imagination is both mythic and rigorously particular.
Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, becoming the first Black American woman to receive the award. She died on August 5, 2019. Her influence on American literature and on the possibilities of the novel as a form for confronting historical trauma has been immeasurable. She is recognized as one of the essential American writers — perhaps the essential American writer of the twentieth century’s final decades — and her work stands as permanent testimony to the cost of slavery and the indestructibility of the human spirit.
