Toni Morrison
1931 – 2019 · United States
Known for: Nobel laureate of memory and freedom
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
Biography
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on 18 February 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, the second of four children of George Wofford, a welder at U.S. Steel, and Ramah Willis Wofford. Her father had left Georgia after a lynching on his own street; her mother's family had come north from Alabama. The household kept its inheritance in language: African American folktales, ghost stories and songs told and sung at home, and a habit of answering cruelty with laughter rather than despair. She read constantly, admired Jane Austen and Tolstoy, and at twelve, on becoming a Catholic, took the baptismal name Anthony, from which the name Toni came. She graduated from Howard University in 1953 and took a master's degree at Cornell in 1955 with a thesis on alienation in Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner.
Morrison taught English at Texas Southern University and then at Howard, married the architect Harold Morrison in 1958 and raised two sons, largely alone after their divorce in 1964. She moved into publishing, and in New York became the first Black woman to serve as a senior fiction editor at Random House, a position she used to move Black writing from the margin to the centre. She published and championed Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Angela Davis and the poet Henry Dumas, brought out Muhammad Ali's autobiography The Greatest, and assembled The Black Book, a documentary anthology of Black life in America from slavery to the 1920s. Her own novels began with The Bluest Eye in 1970 and continued with Sula, then Song of Solomon, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Beloved, the story of a mother marked by slavery, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.
In 1993 Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Other honours followed steadily: the Jefferson Lecture and the National Book Foundation's medal in 1996, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2012, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award in 2016. She went on writing, editing and teaching, and never accepted that Black life required explaining to an outside reader. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty eight and was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame the following year. Her novels remain among the most read and most taught in American literature, and Beloved reached a wider audience still through its film adaptation of 1998.