Toni Morrison

At 88 years old, Toni Morrison has this physical status:

Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor.

Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970.

The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she gained worldwide recognition when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.S. in English and just two years from Cornell University with a master's in American Literature.

She later taught English at Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964.

In the late 1960s, she became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City.

In the 1970s and 1980s, she developed her own reputation as an author, and her perhaps most celebrated work, Beloved, was made into a 1998 film. In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.

Also that year, she was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

On May 29, 2012, President Barack Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In 2016, she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

Early years

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, the second of four children from a working-class, Black family, in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford. Her mother was born in Greenville, Alabama, and moved north with her family as a child. She was a homemaker and a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. George Wofford grew up in Cartersville, Georgia. When Wofford was about 15, a group of white people lynched two African-American businessmen who lived on his street. Morrison later said: "He never told us that he'd seen bodies. But he had seen them. And that was too traumatic, I think, for him." Soon after the lynching, George Wofford moved to the racially integrated town of Lorain, Ohio, in the hope of escaping racism and securing gainful employment in Ohio's burgeoning industrial economy. He worked odd jobs and as a welder for U.S. Steel. Traumatized by his experiences of racism, in a 2015 interview Morrison said her father hated whites so much he would not let them in the house.

When Morrison was about two years old, her family's landlord set fire to the house in which they lived, while they were home, because her parents could not afford to pay rent. Her family responded to what she called this "bizarre form of evil" by laughing at the landlord rather than falling into despair. Morrison later said her family's response demonstrated how to keep your integrity and claim your own life in the face of acts of such "monumental crudeness."

Morrison's parents instilled in her a sense of heritage and language through telling traditional African-American folktales, ghost stories, and singing songs. Morrison also read frequently as a child; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy.

She became a Catholic at the age of 12 and took the baptismal name Anthony (after Anthony of Padua), which led to her nickname, Toni.

Attending Lorain High School, she was on the debate team, the yearbook staff, and in the drama club.

Personal life

While teaching at Howard University from 1957 to 1964, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. She took his last name and became known as Toni Morrison. Their first son, Harold Ford, was born in 1961 (who is married to the economist Cecilia Rouse). She was pregnant when she and Harold divorced in 1964. Her second son, Slade Kevin, was born in 1965.

Morrison began working as an editor for L.W. Singer Company, a textbook division of Random House in Syracuse, New York. She moved with her sons as her career took her to different positions in different places.

Her son Slade Morrison died of pancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, when Morrison was halfway through writing her novel Home. She stopped work on the novel for a year or two before completing it; that novel was published in 2012.

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Career

She enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1949, hoping for the company of fellow black intellectuals. For the first time, she encountered racially segregated restaurants and buses in Howard. She earned a B.A. degree in 1953. In 1955, I began writing in English and went on to earn a Master of Arts degree from Cornell University. "Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's treatment of the alienated" was her master's thesis. She taught English at Texas Southern University in Houston from 1955 to 1957, then Howard University in Houston for the next seven years. She met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect who married in 1958 when she was teaching at Howard. When her first son was born in 1961 and her second son was born in 1964, they were pregnant with their second son.

Morrison began working as an editor for L. W. Singer, a textbook division of publisher Random House in Syracuse, New York, following her divorce and the birth of her son Slade in 1965. She migrated to Random House in New York City, where she became the first black woman senior editor in the fiction department two years later.

Morrison was instrumental in the mainstreaming of Black literature. She was one of the first books she worked on, the groundbreaking Contemporary African Literature (1972), a series that featured work by Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Athol Fugard, a South African playwright. Toni Cade Bambara, a feminist and novelist, Black Panther Huey Newton, and novelist Gayl Jones were among the Afro-American writers whose writing Morrison discovered. She also published the 1975 autobiography of Muhammad Ali, the outspoken boxing champion of the world. My Own Story. In addition, she published and promoted Henry Dumas' book, a little-known novelist and poet who died in 1968 after a transit officer in the New York City Subway was shot to death.

The Black Book (1974), an anthology of photographs, illustrations, essays, and statements of Black life in the United States from the time of slavery to the 1920s, is one of Morrison's other books. Random House had been uncertain about the project, but the project's publication received a warm reception. "Editors, like novelists, have brain children," Alvin Beam wrote about the Cleveland Plain Dealer's anthology, writing: "Editors, like novelists, have brainchildren" – books that readers read and bring to life without putting their names on the title page. Mrs. Morrison has one in the stores now, and magazines and newsletters in the publishing trade are ecstatic, saying it will go like hotcakes."

Morrison began writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard University who met to discuss their work. She attended one meeting with a short story about a Black girl who longed to have blue eyes. Morrison wrote The Bluest Eye, her first book, and raising two children on her own, but later became up every morning at 4 a.m. to write.

When Morrison was 39 years old, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston published the Bluest Eye in 1970. In The New York Times, it was highly praised by John Leonard, who praised Morrison's writing style as being "a prose so precise, so faithful to speech, and so full of pain and wonder that the book becomes poetry. But The Bluest Eye is also a window into history, sociology, folklore, terror, and music. The book did not sell well at first, but the City University of New York included The Bluest Eye on its reading list for its new Black studies program, as did other colleges, which increased sales. Morrison was also attracted by the fabled editor Robert Gottlieb's book at Knopf, an imprint of Random House. The majority of Morrison's books were edited later by Gottlieb.

Morrison's second book Sula (1973), about a black woman's friendship, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1975. Song of Solomon (1977), Macon "Milkman" Dead III's life from birth to adulthood as he learns his roots. This book earned her national recognition as a key selection of the Book of the Month Club, and the first Black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940. The National Book Critics Circle Award was also given to Song of Solomon.

Barnard College presented Morrison with the Barnard Medal of Distinction at its 1979 commencement ceremonies.

Tar Baby (1981), Morrison's next book, was set in a modern setting. Jadine, a stylish fashion model, falls in love with Son, a penniless drifter who is at ease being Black, in this film.

Morrison, who lived in a converted boathouse on the Hudson River in Nyack, New York, in 1983, moved to writing to devote more time to writing. She taught English at two parts of the State University of New York (SUNY) and at Rutgers University's New Brunswick campus. She was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University of Albany, New York, in 1984.

Dreaming Emmett, Morrison's first play, is about the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a black man from Mississippi. The drama was produced at the State University of New York in Albany, New York, where she was attending the time. Morrison served as a visiting professor at Bard College from 1986 to 1988.

Morrison's Beloved, her most well-known book, was published in 1987. It was inspired by Margaret Garner's true story of an enslaved African woman, whose story Morrison discovered when compiling The Black Book. Garner had left slavery but slave hunters had pursued him. Garner, who was returning to slavery, killed her two-year-old daughter but was arrested before she could kill herself. Beloved, Morrison's novel, imagines the dead baby returning as a ghost, causing her mother and her family.

Beloved was a critical success and a bestseller for 25 weeks. Michiko Kakutani, a New York Times book reviewer, said that the scene of the mother's death of her baby is "so violent and sad that it appears to start and end in a single unwavering line of fate." "Ms. Morrison's versatility and technological and emotional arc seem to have no boundaries," Canadian writer Margaret Atwood wrote in a New York Times article. Beloved will put them to rest if there were any doubts about her reputation as a pre-eminent American novelist, whether of her own or some other time period.

However, not all experts praised Beloved. Stanley Crouch, an African-American liberal social critic, wrote in The New Republic that the book "reads largely like a melodrama mounted to the miniseries' structural conceits," and that Morrison "perpetuously interrupts her narrative with maudlin ideological commercials."

Despite overall success, Beloved did not win the prestigious National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award. In a statement issued by The New York Times on January 24, 1988, forty-eight Black critics and writers, including Maya Angelou, protested the deposition. "Despite Toni Morrison's international success, she has yet to receive national recognition for her five major works of fiction fully deserved," they wrote. Beloved was the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction two months ago. It also received an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

Beloved is the first of three books about love and African-American history, often referred to as the Beloved Trilogy. Morrison said that they were supposed to be read together, "the philosophical link is the hunt for the lover – the part of the self that is you and loves you – and is always there for you." In 1992, the second book in the trilogy, Jazz, came out. The book, which is written in a language that imitates jazz music's rhythms, is about a love triangle in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance. Playing in the Shadow (1992), an examination of the African-American presence in white American literature, she also published her first book of literary criticism, Playing in the Shadow (1992). (Playing in the Dark was one of Morrison's most popular books on U.S. college campuses in 2016, alongside several of her books and a 1993 Nobel Prize lecture.)

Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 before the third novel in the Beloved Trilogy was published. "Who in novels characterized by visionary power and poetic import gives life to an essential face of American life," the citation read. She was the first Black woman of any nationality to win the award. Morrison said in her acceptance address: "We die." That may be the meaning of life. We do have words, but we do speak. That may be the true measure of our lives."

Morrison spoke about the power of storytelling in her Nobel lecture. She told a tale in order to make her point. She spoke about a blind, old, Black woman who is approached by a group of young people. "Is there no reason for our lives?" she says. No song, no literature, no vitamin bank, no poetry full of vitamins, and there is no tradition connected to the event that you can pass on to help us get off to a good start. ... Consider our lives and tell us how our culture is molded. Make a tale.

The National Endowment for the Humanities voted Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture in 1996, the highest honor given to "distinguished academic achievement in the humanities" by the US federal government. "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Aspirations," Morrison's lecture, "The Future of Time," started with the aphorism: "Time, it seems, has no future." She warned against using history to deflate expectations of the future. Morrison was also given the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation in 1996, which is given to a writer "who has enriching our literary history through a lifetime of service" or a corpus of work."

Paradise, her third book in her Beloved Trilogy, about residents of an all-Black town, came out in 1997. Morrison appeared on Time magazine in the second year, making her the second female writer of fiction and second Black writer of fiction to appear on what was perhaps the most influential magazine cover of the time.

The Beloved film adaptation was released in 1998, directed by Jonathan Demme and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey, who had spent ten years bringing it to the screen. Sethe, Winfrey's wife, is also starred alongside Paul D. Butler as Sethe's lover, and Thandiwe Newton as Beloved.

At the box office, the film flopped. According to a report in The Economist, "most viewers are not keen to watch almost three hours of a cerebral film with an original storyline based on supernatural myths, assassination, rape, and slavery." Janet Maslin, a film critic, called it a "transfixing, deeply felt adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel." Of course, it's linchpin, Oprah Winfrey, who had the clout and foresight to bring 'Beloved' to the screen and had the dramatic presence to pull it all together. According to another review, Beloved was not a genre ghost story, but the supernatural was used to investigate deeper topics, and Morrison's nonlinear story had a purpose.

Oprah Winfrey, the television talk-show host, selected Song of Solomon for her newly launched Book Club, which became a popular feature on her Oprah Winfrey Show. The show's book club segments attracted an average of 13 million viewers. As a result, Winfrey bought Morrison's earliest book The Bluest Eye in 2000, it sold another 800,000 paperback copies. Morrison's career saw the revival of "The Oprah Effect," according to John Young in the African American Review in 2001, allowing Morrison to reach a large, diverse audience.

Morrison's books have seen a greater success in sales over the six years since she was first proclaimed a Nobel Prize winner in 1993. On Winfrey's program, the novelist appeared three times. "For all those who questioned the question, 'Toni Morrison' answered the question," Winfrey said.' I have a strong feeling there will be no Oprah's Book Club if this woman had not chosen to reveal her love of words to the world. Morrison called the book club a "reading revolution."

Morrison continued to experiment with new art forms, such as providing text for original scores of classical music. She performed with André Previn on the song cycle Honey and Rue, which premiered with Kathleen Battle in January 1992 and on Four Songs in November 1994. Both Sweet Talk and Spirits were written for Jessye Norman with music by Richard Danielpour, and Morrison provided the text for composer Judith Weir's woman.live.song, which premiered in April 2000.

Margaret Garner, the author of Margaret Garner's book Beloved, returned to Margaret Garner's life story to write the libretto for a new opera. The opera was first performed at the Detroit Opera House in 2005, with Richard Danielpour's music.

Love, Morrison's first book since Paradise, came out in 2003. To commemorate the Brown v. Board of Education's decision in 1954 that declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional, she put together a children's book entitled Remember.

Morrison was an Andrew D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University from 1997 to 2003.

Morrison was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by the University of Oxford in June 2005.

The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years in the spring of 2006, as voted by a group of influential writers, literary commentators, and editors. "In Search of the Best," writer A. O. Scott wrote, "Any other result would have been startling," Morrison's book has integrated itself into the American canon more fully than any of its potential rivals." 'Beloved' has, less than 20 years since its inception, become a staple of the college literary curriculum, which is to say a masterpiece. This triumph is commensurate with its aspiration, as Morrison's desire to expand the range of classic American literature to include, as a living Black woman, the firm of dead white males such as Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain.

Morrison paid a visit to the Louvre museum in Paris as the second in the "Grand Invité" program to guest-curate a month-long series of cultural events, including "The Foreigner's Home," according to The New York Times.

Morrison's novel A Mercy, which was published in 2008, is set in the Virginia colonies of 1682. "A Mercy," Diane Johnson's essay in Vanity Fair called "a poetic, visionary, mesmerizing story that captures our present challenges and strains, the natal curse placed on us back in the cradle of our present challenges and strains, against a rugged landscape and the essentially tragic nature of human life"" in the New World.

Morrison served as the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University from 1989 to 2006. "I don't want to hear about your little life," she said of modern fiction writers who use their own lives instead of inventing new ones, and she told her creative writing students. In the same way, she did not want to write about her own experience in a memoir or autobiography.

Morrison, who was part of Princeton's Creative Writing Program, did not continue to provide writing workshops to students until the late 1990s, which earned her some flak. Rather, she designed and created the Princeton Atelier, a project that brings together students, writers, and performance artists. After a year of collaboration, the students and artists create works of art that are on view to the public.

Morrison returned to Princeton in the fall 2008 to lead a small seminar titled "The Foreigner's Home," inspired by her curatorship at the Louvre Museum.

Morrison Hall, a building that had previously known West College, was dedicated in her honor on November 17, 2017.

Morrison appeared on PEN World Voices in May 2010 in a interview with Marlene van Niekerk and Kwame Anthony Appiah about South African literature, especially Van Niekerk's 2004 book Agaat.

Morrison, a painter and a musician, wrote books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison. Slade died of pancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, when Morrison's book Home (2012) was half-completed.

Morrison received an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Rutgers University-New Brunswick in May 2011. She gave a address on "the pursuit of life, liberty, meaningfulness, ethics, and truth" at the commencement service.

Morrison appeared on Desdemona with opera director Peter Sellars and Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré, giving a fresh look at William Shakespeare's tragedy Othello. The trio concentrated on Othello's wife Desdemona and her African nursemaid Barbary, who is only briefly mentioned in Shakespeare. In Vienna, the play, which was a blend of words, music, and song, premiered in 2011.

Morrison had stopped working on her latest book when her son died in 2010, later stating, "I stopped writing before I began to write, I could have told him that if he had caused me to stop." "Please, Mom, I'm dead, will you go on,'" she says.

She completed Home and dedicated it to her son Slade. It's the story of a Korean War soldier in the segregated United States of the 1950s who is trying to save his sister from horrific medical experiments at the hands of a white doctor.

Oberlin College, an international literary society established in 1993, became the home base for Morrison's research.

God Help the Child, Morrison's eleventh book, was published in 2015. It came following Bride, an executive in the fashion and beauty industry, whose mother tortured her as a child for being black-skinned, a traumatic experience that has continued to dog Bride.

Morrison was a member of the editorial advisory board of The Nation, a publication that was launched in 1865 by Northern abolitionists.

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