Toni Morrison

Chloe Wofford grew up in the steel town of Lorain, Ohio, the daughter of a shipyard welder and a mother who sang in church. She took the name Toni from her baptismal name, Anthony, and Morrison from a brief marriage. After Howard University and a master's degree at Cornell she taught, then became one of the first Black women to work as a senior editor at Random House, where she published Angela Davis, Gayl Jones, and The Black Book, an anthology of Black American history.

She wrote at night and in the early mornings while raising two sons alone. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is about a Black girl in Lorain who prays for blue eyes, and it began her lifelong project of writing for Black readers without explaining herself to white ones. Sula followed in 1973 and Song of Solomon in 1977, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and established her as a major novelist.

Beloved, published in 1987, was inspired by the case of Margaret Garner, who in 1856 escaped slavery in Kentucky and, when slave catchers trapped her in Ohio, killed her daughter rather than let her be taken back. In Morrison's telling the dead child returns to haunt her mother. When the novel failed to win the National Book Award, forty-eight Black writers and critics published a protest. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and a survey of critics in 2006 named it the best American novel of the previous twenty-five years.

In 1993 Morrison became the first Black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. She taught at Princeton for seventeen years, wrote essays on race and the American imagination, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Some of her books were frequently challenged in school districts for their depictions of violence and sexuality. She died in August 2019. Her work placed the history of slavery and its aftermath at the center of the American literary canon.