Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was an American novelist, essayist, and editor whose four-decade writing career produced one of the foundational documents of late-20th-century American African-American literature — particularly her 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature win and her 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction win for Beloved. She was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, into a working-class African-American family. Her father George Wofford was a Lorain-area shipyard welder, and her mother Ramah Willis was a homemaker.

Her education at Howard University in Washington, D.C. (B.A. in English, 1953) and Cornell University (M.A. in American Literature, 1955) launched her early-career path. Her 1955–1957 work as a Howard University English-and-Composition instructor and her subsequent 1957–1964 second Howard University English faculty engagement (across which she taught future African-American writer Andrew Young) launched her early-career American academic public profile.

Her 1965 hiring as a Random House textbook-editor and her subsequent 1968 promotion to Random House senior fiction-editor produced her late-1960s American publishing-industry public profile. Her ongoing 1965–1983 Random House editor work launched the early American African-American novelist careers of Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Henry Dumas, June Jordan, and Angela Davis.

Her 1970 first commercial novel The Bluest Eye — released by Holt, Rinehart and Winston — launched her late-20th-century American African-American literature public profile. The 1970 novel produced one of the foundational documents of late-20th-century American African-American women's literary fiction.

Her 1987 fifth commercial novel Beloved — based on the real-life 1856 Margaret Garner Kentucky-runaway-enslaved-mother case in which a fugitive enslaved woman killed her two-year-old daughter rather than allow her to be returned to slavery — won her the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The 1987 novel produced her late-1980s American literary public profile. Her 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature award — making her the first African-American woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature — produced her 1990s international literary public profile. She died on August 5, 2019, at age 88, in The Bronx, New York City, of pneumonia complications.

Her name Toni began as the unisex English diminutive of Antonia. Toni has been a popular American girls' name across the late 20th century.