Toni Morrison
Morrison wrote about Black American life, history and memory in a poetic, demanding prose that widened what American fiction could hold. As an editor and teacher she also brought other Black writers into print and into the classroom.
Personality
Morrison was disciplined, exacting and sure of her own standards. She wrote her first novel while working in publishing and raising two sons alone, getting up at 4 a.m. to write before the day began. She prized invention over confession: she told Princeton writing students she did not want to hear about their own little lives, and she never wrote a memoir. She treated language as something close to a moral act, and in her Nobel acceptance speech she suggested that what people do with language may be the measure of their lives. She spoke openly about race and American politics throughout her career.
Under pressure
Morrison learned early how to meet cruelty without losing herself. When she was about two, the family's landlord set fire to their house because her parents could not pay the rent, and her family answered by laughing at him, a response she later described as a way of keeping one's integrity. When Beloved missed the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, 48 Black writers and critics publicly protested; two months later it won the Pulitzer Prize. After her son Slade died in 2010 she stopped writing for months, then finished Home and dedicated it to him.
The arc
Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, the second of four children of a welder and a homemaker, she took the name Anthony at her Catholic baptism, which became Toni. She studied at Howard and Cornell, taught at Texas Southern and Howard, then became Random House's first Black woman senior editor in fiction. The Bluest Eye appeared in 1970, followed by Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby and Beloved (1987). She won the Nobel Prize in 1993, held a chair at Princeton from 1989 to 2006 and published her eleventh novel, God Help the Child, in 2015. She died in the Bronx on 5 August 2019.
Legacy
Morrison's novels, above all Beloved, are central to the teaching of American literature; in 2006 a New York Times Book Review survey of writers and critics named Beloved the best work of American fiction of the previous 25 years. As an editor she championed Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones and Angela Davis and published Muhammad Ali's autobiography. Her honours include the Pulitzer Prize (1988), the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993), the National Book Foundation's medal (1996), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012) and the National Women's Hall of Fame (2020). Princeton named Morrison Hall after her in 2017.
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