Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize-winning novelist, was born 90 years ago today.
Born Chloe Anthony Wofford to a welder father and homemaker mother in Lorain, Ohio, she graduated from Howard University in 1953, then received a master's in literature at Cornell. She married architect, Howard Morrison, and had two sons.
After she and her husband divorced, Morrison taught English and worked as one of the very few black editors at Random House. She published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1969, followed by Sula in 1973. She first came to national attention in 1978, however, when she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon.
After the publication of her breakthrough novel, she published Tar Baby (1981). Her 1987 novel, Beloved, the story of a 19th century slave who escapes bondage but is forced to kill her own baby, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.
Morrison won the Nobel Prize in 1993, becoming the first African-American to win the award, as well as the first American woman in general to win in more than 50 years.
The same year, a fire destroyed her Nyack, New York, home. Fortunately, she'd left the manuscript of her next novel, Paradise, in her office at Princeton University, where she was teaching creative writing. The book, published in 1998, explored the dynamics of an all-black town in the late 1960s.
Morrison died on August 5, 2019 at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, New York City of complications from pneumonia.
Above, Morrison riding train, circa 1970s
Photo by Jill Krementz