Toni Morrison

Early Life and Education

Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison grew up in a working-class family steeped in African American folklore and oral tradition. She was the second of four children and the first in her first-grade class to arrive already knowing how to read. She adopted the name Toni as a young woman. She earned a bachelor's degree in English from Howard University in 1953, then completed a master's at Cornell University in 1955, writing her thesis on the treatment of suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.

A Double Life: Editor and Novelist

After graduate school, Morrison taught at Texas Southern University and then at Howard. In 1965 she became a textbook editor at L.W. Singer, a subsidiary of Random House, and eventually moved to the main Random House offices in New York, where she became a senior editor. For nearly twenty years, she edited landmark works by major Black writers—including Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones—while writing her own fiction before dawn and after her children were asleep. Her debut novel, The Bluest Eye, appeared in 1970. Song of Solomon (1977) won the National Book Critics Circle Award and became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, the first novel by a Black author to receive that designation since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940.

The Weight of Beloved

Morrison's sixth novel, Beloved (1987), based on the true story of Margaret Garner—an enslaved woman who killed her infant daughter rather than see her returned to slavery—is widely considered her masterpiece and one of the essential American novels of the twentieth century. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. In 1993, Morrison became the first African American and the eighth woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2012. She taught at Princeton University from 1989 to 2006 and continued writing into her eighties, publishing her eleventh novel, God Help the Child, in 2015. She died on August 5, 2019, at the age of 88.

Why Her Books Are Challenged

The Bluest Eye has appeared consistently on the American Library Association's lists of most challenged and banned books since the 1970s. Critics object to its depictions of sexual violence and incest, as well as to passages they characterize as attacking the values of white Christian culture. Beloved is challenged for its explicit and unflinching portrayal of the physical and psychological violence of slavery. Morrison consistently held that such discomfort was the point—that literature which protects readers from the full weight of history fails both the reader and the truth.