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York, publishing firm Alfred A.
Knopf announced. She was 88.
Winner of the Nobel Prize in lit-
erature and a Pulitzer Prize, and
recipient of the Presidential Medal
of Freedom, Morrison was one of
the country’s most celebrated writ-
ers.
The Swedish Academy praised
her novels for their “visionary force
and poetic import.” Morrison, the
academy said, had an “unerring
ear for dialogue and richly expres-
sive depictions of black America.”
In 2012, President Obama called
her a personal hero. Her novel
“Song of Solomon,” he said, taught
him “how to be,” and the late poet
and essayist Maya Angelou de-
scribed her friend as having “the in-
sight of a shaman and the lyricism
of a great poet.”
Loved by legions of fans who
discovered her work either
through the Jonathan Demme film
of “Beloved” or through Oprah’s
Book Club, which selected four of
her novels, Morrison had never
dreamed of becoming a writer. As
she often said, she just couldn’t
find the books she wanted to read.
Beginning with her first novel,
published when she was 39, she
filled the void with an outpouring
of fiction, children’s books, a play
about Emmett Till and an opera
based on “Beloved,” as well as
scores of essays and book reviews.
Her most recent novel, her 11th,
“God Help the Child,” was pub-
lished in April 2015.
Famous for a magisterial pres-
ence with graying dreadlocks, an
affection for scarves and a small
heart pendant of butterstone — in
remembrance of her son, Slade,
who died at 45 — Morrison de-
scribed writing as a “high-wire
act,” in which she sought to blur
the line between serious and popu-
lar fiction.
Longtime friend Claudia Brod-
sky remembered Morrison for her
uncompromising belief in the
power of literature. More than any-
thing, Morrison believed that
books have an ethical responsibil-
ity to shape society and culture.
“She wanted her readers to be
challenged,” Brodsky said. “The
goal of literature was not just to
challenge you in formulistic or aes-
thetic ways, but to enhance your
imagination. She wanted to enrich
their imaginations, to help them
look past barriers of the past and
see her characters standing in
front of them.”
Morrison, Brodsky said, re-
sisted — even resented — any tend-
ency to marginalize her work as
that of a woman’s writer or an Afri-
can American writer.
“She was writing for all people
at all times,” Brodsky said.
Carving her own identity
Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on
Feb. 18, 1931, the second of four chil-
dren, she grew up in Lorain, Ohio, a
small industrial town west of
Cleveland. Morrison described Lo-
rain as “neither plantation nor
ghetto,” a place where segregation
was enforced not so much by laws
but by understanding.
Her parents were fierce in their
convictions. When the family went
on public relief, her mother wrote
President Franklin D. Roosevelt to
complain about the meals, and
when the new movie theater
opened in Lorain, she made her
children sit where the white chil-
dren sat.
As adept as she was exploring
the complexities of identity and
race in her prose, Morrison was
foremost an explorer of her own
identity.
She changed her name in col-
lege: Toni from St. Anthony, her
baptismal name when she con-
verted to Catholicism as a child,
and Morrison from an early mar-
riage that ended in divorce.
She didn’t intend for Toni Mor-
rison to be her published name, but
when she finished her first book,
“The Bluest Eye,” the galley read “A
novel by Toni Morrison,” and by
then the name had been recorded
in the Library of Congress.
She came to accept her twin
identities. Her public persona, she
claimed, was Morrison, but when
she wrote, she became Wofford, the
child who lived in a world of in-
equality.
“In order for her to be Toni Mor-
rison,” said friend and poet Nikki
Giovanni, “she had to invent Toni
Morrison, so she could become
who she is and who she wants to be,
not who others want her to be.”
Morrison went to Howard Uni-
versity in Washington, where she
was exposed to segregation in pub-
lic transportation and high
schools. She studied classics and
joined a troupe of actors who, while
traveling in the South, stayed in
black motels or in the homes of Zi-
on or Baptist congregations.
She earned a master’s degree in
American literature from Cornell
University.
Afterward, she returned to
Howard to teach, meeting poet
Amiri Baraka, aspiring politician
Andrew Young, activist Stokely
Carmichael and writer Claude
Brown.
In later years, she taught at
Princeton, inspiring a new genera-
tion of writers with the moral im-
peratives of literature.
“She was a chess player,” said
one of her students, novelist David
Treuer. “People don’t talk about
that. They talk about her lyricism,
her vernacular. They don’t often
talk about her intellect — and the
war she waged on the perceived no-
tions of being African American.”
In 1957, she married Harold
Morrison, a Jamaican architect.
They broke up when her first son,Harold Ford, was 3, and when she
was pregnant with her second son,
Slade Kevin.
She felt she didn’t conform to
her husband’s notion of what a wife
should be.
“I don’t think I did any of that
very well,” she said. “I did it ad hoc,
like any working mother does.”
Her first job in publishing waswith the textbook division of Ran-
dom House. She was 34.‘Beloved’ was a triumph
Morrison had considered a life
as a dancer, but Jane Austen, Leo
Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky and
Richard Wright changed her mind.
Finding time between her boys and
her work as an editor, she rose eachmorning at 4.
“I used to write with my children
pulling on my hair, babies pulling
on my earrings,” she said. “My baby
once spit up orange juice on my
tablet, and I just wrote around it.”
“The Bluest Eye,” initially re-
jected by two publishers, is the
story of Pecola Breedlove, who sees
herself as ugly for not being white.
Written at a time when “Black is
Beautiful” was the rallying cry,
Morrison wanted to remember
when that wasn’t true, when being
black was painful.
In 1968, she moved to New York,
where she worked with Angela
Davis, Muhammad Ali and Chinua
Achebe and honed her own voice as
a writer.
Her third novel, “Song of Solo-
mon,” won the 1978 National Book
Critics Circle Award, beating out
Joan Didion’s “A Book of Common
Prayer” and John Cheever’s “Fal-
coner.”
As her critical reputation grew,
Robert Gottlieb, editor in chief of
Knopf, encouraged her to leave
publishing.
“You can write ‘writer’ on your
tax returns,” he said.
With its simple dedication,
“Sixty Million and more,” a refer-
ence to the number of black people
who died in 200 years of slavery,
“Beloved” was as radical as it was
profound.
“I certainly thought I knew as
much about slavery as anybody,”
she told the Los Angeles Times,
“but it was the interior life I needed
to find out about.”
“Beloved” was a triumph of the
imagination, a book that followed
in the tradition of William Faulkner
with a story as realized as its prose
was incantatory.
Imagining the slain child, Mor-
rison gave words to the ghost who
lives in the company of her mother,
Sethe.
“I am not dead,” says the child,
known as Beloved. “I sit the sun
closes my eyes when I open them I
see the face I lost Sethe’s is the face
that left me Sethe sees me see her
and I see the smile her smiling face
is the place for me ....”
When “Beloved” was not nomi-
nated for a National Book Award,
intellectuals and writers protested
“against such oversight and harm-
ful whimsy” in a statement printed
in the New York Times.
“For all America, for all of
American letters,” the letter ad-
dressed Morrison, “you have ad-
vanced the moral and artistic
standards by which we must mea-
sure the daring and the love of our
national imagination and our col-
lective intelligence as a people.”
Some took exception to the
book. Critic Stanley Crouch called
it “trite” and “sentimental.” He lik-
ened Morrison to P.T. Barnum and
objected to the book’s commercial-
ism.
Six years later, Morrison re-
ceived the phone call from the
Swedish Academy. Brodsky recalls
how she and Morrison twirled
around in an impromptu dance as
the reporters waited outside her
office.
She was the 11th American writ-
er to win the Nobel.
Not long after the Nobel an-
nouncement, Morrison lost her
home, a houseboat on the Hudson
River. A fire consumed drafts of her
books, her sons’ school reports,
family photos and first editions.
When an interviewer asked
about it, her eyes filled with tears.
“Let’s not go there,” she said.
In 2010, her son, Slade, died pan-
creatic cancer, and for a time Mor-
rison stopped working. When
asked on “Oprah” about his death
and how she might find “closure,”
she rejected the idea as “some kind
of insult.”
She ultimately found solace in
her memories, and like so many of
her characters she welcomed the
ghosts into her life.
While critics were hard on her
later novels, arguing that her writ-
ing had become overwrought and
her plots too tangled, Morrison
was undeterred.
“What Toni and Maya showed
was a willingness to fight for their
vision and the courage to create
themselves,” Giovanni said.
Morrison celebrated courage
in Stockholm at the Nobel ceremo-
ny, offering words of encourage-
ment for new generations of
writers.
“Passion is never enough; nei-
ther is skill,” she said. “But try. For
our sake and yours ... tell us what
the world has been to you in the
dark places and in the light. Don’t
tell us what to believe, what to fear.
Show us belief ’s wide skirt and the
stitch that unravels fear’s caul.”TONI MORRISON, 1931 - 2019
Captured complexion of life and race
[Morrison,from A1]
Mandel NganAFP/Getty Images
CELEBRATED AUTHOR
Winner of the Nobel Prize in literature — the 11th American writer to win one — and a Pulitzer
Prize, Toni Morrison received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2012.Jack MitchellGetty Images
WORKING MOTHER
Morrison with her sons Harold Ford, left, and Slade Kevin in 1978. After Slade died of pancreat-
ic cancer in 2010 at age 45, Morrison wore a small heart pendant in remembrance of him.Patrick SemanskyAssociated Press
A TOWERING PRESENCE
Robert McCurdy’s painting of Morrison hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Morrison’s
writing, which she called a “high-wire act,” blurred the line between serious and popular fiction.Toni Morrison
‘wanted her readers to
be challenged ... to
help them look past
barriers of the past
and see her characters
standing in front of
them.’
— Claudia Brodsky,
longtime friend