Toni Morrison by Christopher Drexel. Retrieved from flickr.com, public domain (accessed: February 2, 2022).
Toni Morrison
, 1931 - 2019
Toni Morrison was a well-known American writer, editor and academic renowned for exploring the African American experience, particularly from a feminist perspective. She was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio. Her parents instilled in her a love of reading, music, folklore and a respect for black culture. She was a gifted and hardworking student who studied Latin in high school. She gained a BA from Howard University, majoring in English with a minor in classics, and an MA from Cornell. After a period of academic teaching she became a fiction editor at Random House in New York, the first black woman to hold the position.
She began publishing her own writing in the 1970s and 1980s. Her first book, The Bluest Eye (1970), is the story of a black girl obsessed by white standards of beauty. Her best known work, Beloved (1987), which was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is based on the story of mulatto slave Margaret Garner, who killed her two year old daughter rather than have her return to slavery. The story has been compared to the myth of Medea, and in 1998 was adapted into a feature film co-produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey, and in 2005 Morrison composed the libretto for the opera Margaret Garner. In 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first African American woman to receive the honour.
Morrison wrote an extensive list of novels, short stories, plays and non fiction publications. With her son Slade, she published a number of children’s books. She has received a raft of international honours and recognitions for her work. In 2012 Barak Obama presented her with a US Presidential Medal of Freedom. She died in 2019, aged 88.
Sources:
britannica.com (accessed: December 30, 2020).
womenshistory.org (accessed: December 30, 2020).
Bio prepared by Miriam Riverlea, University of New England, mriverlea@gmail.com
Records in database:
