Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, an American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the PEN/Saul bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Morrison is one of the most significant and groundbreaking of all contemporary American authors.
Born Chloe Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison moved to DC to attend Howard University, graduating in 1953. She than earned an MA at Cornell University (1955) and taught at Texas Southern University in Houston for two years. She returned to the city to teach at Howard in the English Department for seven years, living at these two addresses on the same street, and it was here where she married and had two children before divorcing in 1964. During that time, she was an active member in the salon in the home of May Miller and wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970).
After the breakup of her marriage, Morrison worked as an editor in New York at Random House from 1965 to 1983, where she worked with such writers as Chinua Achebe, Muhammad Ali, Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, Athol Fugard, Gayl Jones, Huey Newton, and Wole Soyinka. She was the first senior editor of African descent in Random House’s fiction department, playing a vital role in the elevation of Black voices to American readers. From 1989 to 2006, Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair of Humanities at Princeton University, and the university named a building in her honor in 2017. She was also on the editorial advisory board of The Nation.
Morrison is the author of eleven novels, including Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987), A Mercy (2008), and God Help the Child(2015). She also published children’s literature, plays, an opera libretto, and several collections of nonfiction. Morrison appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1998, and a quote of hers is inscribed in marble at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Her novel Beloved was adapted into a movie in 1998, directed by Jonathan Demme and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey. She is the subject of three documentary films. The Toni Morrison Society is based in Georgia, under the auspices of the American Literature Association; in addition to scholarly conferences, the society sponsors book prizes, teaching initiatives, and a Young Readers Circle.
In her 1993 Nobel Prize lecture, Morrison stated: “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge… It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.”