Morrison, Toni

Impact on the world

Won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for 'Beloved,' a novel inspired by the true story of an enslaved woman who killed her own child rather than see her returned to slavery, after 48 Black writers and critics, including Maya Angelou, publicly protested the novel's earlier exclusion from the National Book Award; in 1993 Morrison became the first Black woman, from any country, to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Life & background

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University and earned a master's degree from Cornell before becoming, in the late 1960s, the first Black woman to serve as a fiction editor at Random House, where she helped bring the work of Black writers including Angela Davis and Toni Cade Bambara into mainstream publishing. She published her debut novel, 'The Bluest Eye,' in 1970 at age 39, followed by 'Sula' and the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning 'Song of Solomon' in 1977, which brought her to national attention. Her 1987 novel 'Beloved,' based on the true story of formerly enslaved woman Margaret Garner, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 after failing to win the National Book Award the prior year, an omission that prompted 48 Black writers and critics to publish a protest statement in the New York Times. In 1993 Morrison became the first Black woman, from any country, to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, with the Nobel committee praising novels 'characterized by visionary force and poetic import.' She continued teaching at Princeton while writing further acclaimed novels, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2012.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; Biography.com; National Women's History Museum