COUNTRY OF BIRTH

United States

INDUSTRY

Literature

TOP ACHIEVEMENTS

Toni Morrison is a multiple-award-winning author and novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for her novel, Beloved, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is particularly celebrated for her examination of the black, often female experience, within the black community in the United States.

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION

Toni Morrison was born on February 18, 1931 as Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio. As a child, Morrison was an avid reader and adored Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. She attended Lorain High School and was part of the debate team, yearbook staff, and drama club. She completed a B.A. in English at Howard University in 1953 and an M.A in American Literature at Cornell University. She married in 1957, had two children, and divorced in 1964.

EARLY CAREER

In the late 1960s, Toni Morrison became the first black female fiction editor at Random House, New York City. Over the course of the next two decades, she developed her own reputation as a highly respected author. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. She followed it with a second novel, Sula, which was nominated for the National Book Award. Her third novel, Song of Solomon, was published in 1977. It was included in the Book of the Month Club and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. After her fourth novel, Tar Baby, Morrison left publishing to focus on writing and teaching. She remained in New York and taught English at the State University of New York and at Rutgers. From 1989 until she retired in 2006, Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University. Over the course of her career she wrote many other books and plays.

RECOGNITION

Toni Morrison has received numerous awards and honors, including a Pulitzer in 1988 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. In 1979, she was awarded the Barnard Medal of Distinction by Barnard College. In 1996, she was chosen by the National Endowment for the Humanities for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government’s highest honor in the humanities. The same year, she received the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. In 2012, Morrison received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from then-President Barack Obama. In 2016, she was honored with the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction

ADDITIONAL FACTS

Morrison wrote children's books with her son, Slade Morrison, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2010 In 2019, Morrison passed away at the age of 88 as a result of pneumonia complications.