Toni Morrison gave
voice to millions of peo-
ple who had long been
relegated to the margins
of American literature and life. With
poetic and often painful language, the
Nobel Prize–winning author placed
African-Americans—particularly
women—at the heart of her 11 novels.
Many of Morrison’s characters were
tortured but proud figures who were,
she said, “unavailable to pity.” They
included Sethe, the runaway slave in
Beloved (1987) who commits infan-
ticide rather than see her daughter
raised in bondage; Pecola Breedlove,
a black girl who struggles with feel-
ings of racial inferiority and longs for
eyes like Shirley Temple in The Bluest
Eye (1970); and Macon “Milkman”
Dead III, who spends decades search-
ing for his roots and identity in Song
of Solomon (1977). Slavery and its
brutal legacy coursed through her
work. “Anybody white could take
your whole self for anything that came to mind,” Morrison wrote
in Beloved, which was set in the 19th century but read as a meta-
phor for the 20th. “Not just work, kill or maim you, but dirty
you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore.” What
drove Morrison to write about the African-American experience,
she said in 2003, “was the silence—so many stories untold and
unexamined. There was a wide vacuum in the literature.”
She was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, to a ship-
builder father and homemaker mother, said The New York Times.
“Young Chloe grew up in a house suffused with narrative and
superstition.” She listened to ghost stories and folktales told by
her parents—both of whom were descended from slaves—and
watched as her grandmother “ritually consulted a book on dream
interpretation.” At school Chloe developed a love of literature,
especially the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jane Austen,
and went on to study English and classics at the historically black
Howard University in Washington, D.C. Classmates struggled to
pronounce “Chloe,” so she started going by Toni, from the bap-
tismal name Anthony—patron saint of the poor and the lost—she
had taken on converting to Catholicism at age 12.
Soon after earning a master’s degree from Cornell University she
joined the Howard faculty, “where her students included the
civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael,” said The Washington
Post. In 1958, she wed Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect.
“Their marriage was an unhappy one,” with Harold believing
a wife should be subservient to her husband. “I was a complete
nuisance to mine,” she said. Morrison started writing fiction to
escape, said The Times (U.K.). “I wrote like someone with a dirty
habit,” she explained. “Secretly, compulsively, slyly.” One early
short story was inspired by a childhood friend who, Morrison
said, confessed to losing faith in God because “she had prayed for,
and not been given, blue eyes.” After getting divorced in 1964,
Morrison moved with her two young sons to New York City, tak-
ing a job as a senior editor at Random House. Over the next two
decades, Morrison would cultivate what she called “a canon of
black work,” editing books by Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara,Gayl Jones, and Muhammad Ali,
and African authors including Wole
Soyinka and Chinua Achebe.In her late 30s, Morrison began
working on her own novels, writ-
ing “whenever she could find time,”
said Time. She wrote at daybreak
when her boys were still asleep, and
would scribble out paragraphs on her
steering wheel while stuck in traffic.
Her debut, The Bluest Eye, was set
in 1941 and inspired by the “Black
Is Beautiful” movement that took
off in the 1960s. “There was a time
when black wasn’t beautiful,” she
said. “And you hurt.” Her next novel,
Sula (1973), focused on two child-
hood best friends whose lives radically
diverge. Like many of Morrison’s
books, Sula captured the importance
of black sisterhood. It was “so critical
among black women because there
wasn’t anybody else,” she explained.
“We saved one another’s lives for
generations.” Nationwide acclaim came with Song of Solomon. It
was picked as a main selection by the Book of the Month Club,
the first novel by a black author to receive the honor since Richard
Wright’s Native Son in 1940.But it was Morrison’s “fifth novel, Beloved, that proved to be
her most celebrated work,” said The Hollywood Reporter. In a
chilling feat of literary invention, Morrison gives words to the
slain infant, who lives as a ghost with her mother—a symbol of
the bloody history that continues to haunt African-Americans. “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.” The novel was an instant sensation, spending
25 weeks on the best-seller list. When Beloved failed to win a
National Book Award in 1988, 48 black writers—including Maya
Angelou, Ernest J. Gaines, and Alice Walker—wrote an open letter
protesting the oversight. Later that year, Beloved won the Pulitzer
Prize for fiction, the first of many major awards for Morrison.
She received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993, “the first black
woman to be so honored,” and in 2012 was presented with the
Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the
U.S., by President Barack Obama.The accolades didn’t cause Morrison to slow down. She won
acclaim for the improvisational style of Jazz (1992), which was
“set in 1920s Harlem and echoed to the strains of black jazz
music,” said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). More novels followed,
as well as three children’s books, collections of essays, and the
libretto for Margaret Garner, an opera about the real-life slave
who had inspired Beloved. Her final novel, God Help the Child,
which explores childhood trauma visited upon a dark-skinned
woman and how it shapes her adulthood, was published in 2015.
“Word-work is sublime,” Morrison said in her Nobel lecture in
1993, “because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our
difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like
no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do
language. That may be the measure of our lives.”Obituaries
Ge
tty
Toni
Morrison
1931–201935
The Nobel laureate who chronicled the black experience