Nobel laureate Toni Morrison photographed in Manhattan on October 13, 2003. (Photo by Bruce Gilbert/Newsday RM)
School period
Gallery of Toni Morrison
2600 Ashland Ave, Lorain, OH 44052, United States
Toni Morrison graduated from Lorain High School with honors in 1949.
College/University
Gallery of Toni Morrison
2400 6th St NW, Washington, DC 20059, United States
At Howard University, Morrison continued to pursue her interest in literature. She majored in English and chose the classics for her minor.
Gallery of Toni Morrison
Ithaca, NY 14850,, United States
Morrison continued her education at Cornell University. She wrote her thesis on the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner and completed her master's degree in 1955.
Career
Gallery of Toni Morrison
1970
New York, United States
American author and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Toni Morrison sits and poses for a portrait in front of a bookshelf full of books, she is sporting a large hairdo, New York, 1970. (Photo by Bernard Gotfryd)
Gallery of Toni Morrison
1979
New York, United States
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison photographed in New York City in 1979. (Photo by Jack Mitchell)
Gallery of Toni Morrison
1997
New York, United States
Novelist Toni Morrison poses in her apartment in December 1997 in New York City, New York. (Photo by Deborah Feingold)
Gallery of Toni Morrison
2003
New York, United States
Author Toni Morrison speaks at the Risk-Takers In The Arts honors benefit hosted by the Sundance Institute at Cipriani 42nd Street on April 23, 2003, in New York City. (Photo by Evan Agostini)
Gallery of Toni Morrison
2004
New York, United States
Toni Morrison poses on February 2, 2004, in her downtown Manhattan apartment in New York City. (Photo by Jean-Christian Bourcart)
Gallery of Toni Morrison
2010
Paris, France
Author and Nobel Prize in Literature winner Toni Morrison receives the Honor Medal of The City of Paris (Grand Vermeil) at Mairie de Paris on November 4, 2010, in Paris, France. (Photo by Francois Durand)
Gallery of Toni Morrison
2012
Italy
Toni Morrison, American writer, novelist, editor, Italy, September 2012. (Photo by Leonardo Cendamo)
Gallery of Toni Morrison
Author Toni Morrison at home. (Photo by James Keyser/The LIFE Images Collection)
American author and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Toni Morrison sits and poses for a portrait in front of a bookshelf full of books, she is sporting a large hairdo, New York, 1970. (Photo by Bernard Gotfryd)
Author Toni Morrison speaks at the Risk-Takers In The Arts honors benefit hosted by the Sundance Institute at Cipriani 42nd Street on April 23, 2003, in New York City. (Photo by Evan Agostini)
Author and Nobel Prize in Literature winner Toni Morrison receives the Honor Medal of The City of Paris (Grand Vermeil) at Mairie de Paris on November 4, 2010, in Paris, France. (Photo by Francois Durand)
Morrison continued her education at Cornell University. She wrote her thesis on the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner and completed her master's degree in 1955.
Connections
Son: Harold Morrison
New York, United States
American Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison (center) poses with her sons Harold Ford Morrison and Kevin Slade Morrison, New York, 1980s. (Photo by Bernard Gotfryd)
(Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for...)
Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison's virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.
(Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who be...)
Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal - or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald, and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.
(Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccent...)
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars, and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world.
(Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spe...)
Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding New York Times bestseller transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
(In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees not...)
In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe's wife, Violet, attacks the girl's corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.
Toni Morrison was an American writer noted for her examination of Black experience within the Black community. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
Background
Born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, United States, the second oldest of four children. Her father, George Wofford, worked primarily as a welder but held several jobs at once to support the family. Her mother, Ramah, was a domestic worker. Morrison later credited her parents with instilling in her a love of reading, music, and folklore along with clarity and perspective.
Education
Living in an integrated neighborhood, Morrison did not become fully aware of racial divisions until she was in her teens. "When I was in first grade, nobody thought I was inferior. I was the only Black in the class and the only child who could read," she later told a reporter from The New York Times. Dedicated to her studies, Morrison took Latin in school and read many great works of European literature. She graduated from Lorain High School with honors in 1949.
At Howard University, Morrison continued to pursue her interest in literature. She majored in English and chose the classics for her minor. After graduating from Howard in 1953, Morrison continued her education at Cornell University. She wrote her thesis on the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner and completed her master's degree in 1955.
After graduating from Cornell University in 1955, Morrison moved to the Lone Star State to teach at Texas Southern University. In 1957, she returned to Howard University to teach English. There Morrison joined a writers group that met on campus. She began working on her first novel with the group, which started out as a short story.
Morrison decided to leave Howard in 1963. In 1965, she moved with her sons to Syracuse, New York, where she worked for a textbook publisher as a senior editor. Morrison later went to work for Random House, where she edited works by Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones, renowned for their literary fiction, as well as luminaries like Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali.
Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. She used it as her literary first name "Toni," based on a nickname derived from Saint Anthony after she'd joined the Catholic Church. The book follows a young African American girl, Pecola Breedlove, who believes her incredibly difficult life would be better if only she had blue eyes. The controversial book didn't sell well, with Morrison stating in a 1994 afterword that the reception to the work was parallel to how her main character was treated by the world: "dismissed, trivialized, misread."
Morrison nonetheless continued to explore the African American experience in its many forms and eras in her work. Her next novel, Sula (1973), explores good and evil through the friendship of two women who grew up together in Ohio. Sula was nominated for the American Book Award.
Song of Solomon (1977) became the first work by an African American author to be a featured selection in the Book of the Month club since Native Son by Richard Wright. The lyrical story follows the journey of Milkman Dead, a Midwestern urban denizen who attempts to make sense of family roots and the often harsh realities of his world. Morrison received a number of accolades for the novel, which would go on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award and become a perennial favorite among academics and general readers.
A rising literary star, Morrison was appointed to the National Council on the Arts in 1980. The following year, Tar Baby was published. The Caribbean-based novel drew some inspiration from folktales and received a decidedly mixed reaction from critics. Her next work, however, proved to be one of her greatest masterpieces. Beloved (1987) explores love and the supernatural. Inspired by real-world figure Margaret Garner, main character Sethe, a former enslaved person, is haunted by her decision to kill her children rather than see them become enslaved. Three of her children survived, but her infant daughter died at her hand. Yet Sethe's daughter returns as a living entity who becomes an unrelenting presence in her home. For this spellbinding work, Morrison won several literary awards, including the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Ten years later, the book was turned into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey, Thandie Newton, and Danny Glover.
Morrison became a professor at Princeton University in 1989 and continued to produce great works, including Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). In recognition of her contributions to her field, she received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first African American woman to be selected for the award. The following year, she published the novel Jazz, which explores marital love and betrayal in 20th-century Harlem.
At Princeton, Morrison established a special workshop for writers and performers known as the Princeton Atelier in 1994. The program was designed to help students create original works in a variety of artistic fields.
Outside of her academic work, Morrison continued to write new works of fiction. Her next novel, Paradise (1998), which focuses on a fictional African American town called Ruby, earned mixed reviews.
In 1999, Morrison branched out to children's literature. She worked with her artist son Slade on The Big Box (1999), The Book of Mean People (2002), The Ant or the Grasshopper? (2003) and Little Cloud and Lady Wind (2010). She has also explored other genres, writing the play Dreaming Emmett in the mid-1980s and the lyrics for "Four Songs" with composer Andre Previn in 1994 and "Sweet Talk" with composer Richard Danielpour in 1997. And in 2000, The Bluest Eye, which initially had modest sales, became a literary blockbuster upon being chosen as the Oprah Book Club pick, going on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.
Her next novel, Love (2003), divides its narrative between the past and present. Bill Cosey, a wealthy entrepreneur and owner of the Cosey Hotel and Resort, is the center figure in the work. The flashbacks explore his community life and flawed relationships with women, with his death casting a long shadow on the present. A critic for Publisher's Weekly praised the book, stating that "Morrison has crafted a gorgeous, stately novel whose mysteries are gradually unearthed."
In 2006, Morrison announced she was retiring from her post at Princeton. That year, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best novel of the past 25 years. She continued to explore new art forms, writing the libretto for Margaret Garner, an American opera that explores the tragedy of slavery through the true-life story of one woman's experiences. The work debuted at the New York City Opera in 2007.
Morrison traveled back to the early days of colonialism in America for A Mercy (2008), a book that some have construed as a page-turner in its unfolding. Once again, a woman who is both an enslaved and a mother must make a terrible choice regarding her child, who becomes part of an expanding homestead. As a critic from the Washington Post described it, the novel is "a fusion of mystery, history, and longing," with the New York Times singling out the work as one of the 10 Best Books of the year.
In addition to her many novels, Morrison has crafted nonfiction as well. She published a collection of her essays, reviews, and speeches, What Moves at the Margin, in 2008.
A champion for the arts, Morrison spoke out about censorship in October 2009 after one of her books was banned at a Michigan high school. She served as editor for Burn This Book, a collection of essays on censorship and the power of the written word, which was published that same year. She told a crowd gathered for the launch of the Free Speech Leadership Council about the importance of fighting censorship. "The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists' questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films - that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink," Morrison said.
In 2017 the author released The Origin of Others - an exploration on race, fear, mass migration, and borders - based on her Norton lectures at Harvard.
Morrison continued to be one of literature's great storytellers through her 80s. She published the novel Home in 2012, exploring a period of American history once again - this time, the post-Korean War era. "I was trying to take the scab off the '50s, the general idea of it as very comfortable, happy, nostalgic. Mad Men. Oh, please," she said to the Guardian in reference to choosing the setting. "There was a horrible war you didn't call a war, where 58,000 people died. There was McCarthy." Her main character, Frank, is a veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that adversely affects his relationships and ability to function in the world.
In 2015, Morrison published God Help the Child, a layered novella focusing on the experiences of the character Bride - a young, dark-skinned Black woman who works in the cosmetics industry while reckoning with the rejections of her past. That same year the BBC aired the documentary Toni Morrison Remembers. In autumn 2016, she received the Pen/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.
Morrison died on August 5, 2019, at Montefiore Medical Center in New York.
(Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who be...)
1973
Religion
Toni Morrison was a Catholic.
Politics
In the Democratic primary contest for the 2008 presidential race, Morrison endorsed Senator Barack Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton, though expressing admiration and respect for the latter.
In 2012, she responded to a question about the difference between black and white feminists in the 1970s. "Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves," she explained. "They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed."
Views
Morrison's novels were characterized by carefully crafted prose, in which ordinary words were placed in relief so as to produce lyrical phrases and to elicit sharp emotional responses from her readers. Although her novels typically concentrate on Black women, Morrison does not identify her works as feminist. When asked in a 1998 interview "Why distance oneself from feminism?" she replied: "In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book - leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity."
The central theme of Morrison's novels is the Black American experience; in an unjust society, her characters struggle to find themselves and their cultural identity.
Quotations:
"We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."
Personality
Toni Morrison was interested in African American folklore, music, rituals, and myths.
Interests
Reading
Writers
Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy
Music & Bands
African American music
Connections
At Howard University Toni Morrison met Harold Morrison, an architect originally from Jamaica. The couple married in 1958 and welcomed their first child, Harold, in 1961.
After spending the summer traveling with her family in Europe, Toni Morrison returned to the United States with her son. Her husband, however, had decided to move back to Jamaica. At the time, Morrison was pregnant with their second child. She moved back home to live with her family in Ohio before the birth of son Slade in 1964.