Morrison passed away in 2019 due to complications from pneumonia in New York City at the age of 88. Among her many accolades, Morrison was granted an honorary degree from Oxford University in 2005, and she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2012. She was a gifted essayist and sought-after speaker. Morrison was the chair of the Humanities Department at Princeton University from 1989 until her retirement in 2006. She then became the first African American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, which was the same year that Beloved was adapted into a film starring Oprah Winfrey. Other works by Morrison include Tar Baby (1981), her only short story, “Recitatif” (1983), Jazz(1992), Paradise (1998). That novel, considered by many to be her best, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Her most well-known and perhaps best work, Beloved, appeared in 1987 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. In 1977, Morrison won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her book Song of Solomon. The Bluest Eye was followed by Sula in 1973, which secured her a nomination for the National Book Award.
Morrison’s body of work is extensive, including ten novels, seven works of nonfiction, two plays, and three children’s stories. She often covered themes of injustice, oppression, racism, and identity with her captivating, poetic prose. Morrison is known for her deft examination of the Black experience. During this difficult and somewhat lonely time, she began working on her first novel, The Bluest Eye, which was published in 1970. They were married from 1958 to 1964, and the couple had two sons. Afer the couple split up and the birth of her second son, Morrison moved to New York and became an editor at Random House, specializing in Black fiction. Afterward, she taught at Texas Southern University and then at Howard, in Washington, D.C., where she met Harold Morrison, an architect from Jamaica.
She received her undergraduate degree from Howard University in 1953 and her master’s degree from Cornell University in 1955, completing a thesis on William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. She credited her family and upbringing for her love and appreciation of Black culture. She grew up in the Midwest and developed a deep love of storytelling and folklore from a young age. She was a Nobel Prize-winning novelist most famous for her exploration of the Black experience, particularly the Black female experience. Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931.
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