Background and career
Chloe Anthony Wofford "Toni" Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019) was an American novelist and editor. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. 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). Some of her other works include Sula (1973) and the short story "Recitatif" (1983). Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. Morrison earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first Black female editor for fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her novel Beloved was made into a film in 1998. Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience. The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities, in 1996. She was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on May 29, 2012. She received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. Morrison was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020.
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, the second of four children from a working-class, black family, in Lorain, Ohio, west of Cleveland, 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 years old, 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. In a 2015 interview Morrison said that her father, traumatized by his experiences of racism, hated white people 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. She read frequently as a child; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. Morrison 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.
In 1949, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., she was the 2nd of her siblings to attend college, seeking the company of fellow Black intellectuals. Initially a student in the drama program at Howard, she studied theatre with celebrated drama teachers Anne Cooke Reid and Owen Dodson. It was while at Howard that she encountered racially segregated restaurants and buses for the first time. Morrison graduated in 1953 with a bachelor's degree in English and minor in classics. While at Howard, she was able to work with key members of the Harlem Renaissance era such as Alain Locke and Sterling Brown. Additionally, she participated in the university's theater group, known as the Howard Players, where she had the opportunity to travel the Deep South, which was a defining experience of her life. Morrison went on to earn a Master of Arts degree in 1955 from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Her master's thesis was titled "Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's treatment of the alienated". She taught English, first at Texas Southern University in Houston from 1955 to 1957, and then at Howard University for the next seven years. While teaching at Howard, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. Their first son was born in 1961 and she was pregnant with their second son when she and Harold divorced in 1964. After her divorce and the birth of her son Slade in 1965, Morrison began working as an editor for L. W. Singer, a textbook division of publisher Random House, in Syracuse, New York. Two years later, she transferred to Random House in New York City, where she became their first Black woman senior editor in the fiction department. In that capacity, Morrison played a vital role in bringing Black literature into the mainstream. One of the first books she worked on was the groundbreaking Contemporary African Literature (1972), a collection that included work by Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and South African playwright Athol Fugard. She fostered a new generation of Afro-American writers, including poet and novelist Toni Cade Bambara, radical activist Angela Davis, Black Panther Huey Newton and novelist Gayl Jones, whose writing Morrison discovered. She also brought to publication the 1975 autobiography of the outspoken boxing champion Muhammad Ali, The Greatest: My Own Story. In addition, she published and promoted the work of Henry Dumas, a little-known novelist and poet who in 1968 had been shot to death by a transit officer in the New York City Subway. Among other books that Morrison developed and edited is The Black Book (1974), an anthology of photographs, illustrations, essays, and documents of Black life in the United States from the time of slavery to the 1920s. Random House had been uncertain about the project but its publication met with a good reception. Alvin Beam reviewed the anthology for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, writing: "Editors, like novelists, have brain children – books they think up and bring to life without putting their own names on the title page. Mrs. Morrison has one of these in the stores now, and magazines and newsletters in the publishing trade are ecstatic, saying it will go like hotcakes."
Morrison had begun 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 later developed the story as her first novel, The Bluest Eye, getting up every morning at 4 am to write, while raising two children on her own.
The Bluest Eye was published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston in 1970, when Morrison was aged 39. It was favorably reviewed in The New York Times by John Leonard, who praised Morrison's writing style as being "a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry ... But The Bluest Eye is also history, sociology, folklore, nightmare and music." The novel did not sell well at first, but the City University of New York put The Bluest Eye on its reading list for its new Black studies department, as did other colleges, which boosted sales. The book also brought Morrison to the attention of the acclaimed editor Robert Gottlieb at Knopf, an imprint of the publisher Random House. Gottlieb later edited all but one of Morrison's novels. In 1975, Morrison's second novel Sula (1973), about a friendship between two Black women, was nominated for the National Book Award. Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), follows the life of Macon "Milkman" Dead III, from birth to adulthood, as he discovers his heritage. This novel brought her national acclaim, being a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, the first novel by a Black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940. Song of Solomon also won the National Book Critics Circle Award. At its 1979 commencement ceremonies, Barnard College awarded Morrison its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction. Morrison gave her next novel, Tar Baby (1981), a contemporary setting. In it, a looks-obsessed fashion model, Jadine, falls in love with Son, a penniless drifter who feels at ease with being Black. Resigning from Random House in 1983, Morrison left publishing to devote more time to writing, while living in a converted boathouse on the Hudson River in Nyack, New York. She taught English at two branches of the State University of New York (SUNY) and at Rutgers University's New Brunswick campus. In 1984, she was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University at Albany, SUNY. Morrison's first play, Dreaming Emmett, is about the 1955 murder by white men of Black teenager Emmett Till. The play was commissioned by the New York State Writers Institute at the State University of New York at Albany, where she was teaching at the time. It was produced in 1986 by Capital Repertory Theatre and directed by Gilbert Moses. Morrison was also a visiting professor at Bard College from 1986 to 1988.
In 1987, Morrison published her most celebrated novel, Beloved. It was inspired by the true story of an enslaved African-American woman, Margaret Garner, whose story Morrison had discovered when compiling The Black Book. Garner had escaped slavery but was pursued by slave hunters. Facing a return to slavery, Garner killed her two-year-old daughter but was captured before she could kill herself. Morrison's novel imagines the dead baby returning as a ghost, Beloved, to haunt her mother and family. Beloved was a critical success and a bestseller for 25 weeks. The New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote that the scene of the mother killing her baby is "so brutal and disturbing that it appears to warp time before and after into a single unwavering line of fate". Canadian writer Margaret Atwood wrote in a review for The New York Times, "Ms. Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, Beloved will put them to rest." Some critics panned Beloved. African-American conservative social critic Stanley Crouch, for instance, complained in his review in The New Republic that the novel "reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries", and that Morrison "perpetually interrupts her narrative with maudlin ideological commercials". Despite overall high acclaim, Beloved failed to win the prestigious National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award. Forty-eight Black critics and writers, among them Maya Angelou, protested the omission in a statement that The New York Times published on January 24, 1988. "Despite the international stature of Toni Morrison, she has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve", they wrote. Two months later, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It also won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Beloved is the first of three novels about love and African-American history, sometimes called the Beloved Trilogy. Morrison said they are intended to be read together, explaining: "The conceptual connection is the search for the beloved – the part of the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you." The second novel in the trilogy, Jazz, came out in 1992. Told in language that imitates the rhythms of jazz music, the novel is about a love triangle during the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. According to Lyn Innes, "Morrison sought to change not just the content and audience for her fiction; her desire was to create stories which could be lingered over and relished, not 'consumed and gobbled as fast food', and at the same time to ensure that these stories and their characters had a strong historical and cultural base." In 1992, Morrison also published her first book of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), an examination of the African-American presence in White American literature. (In 2016, Time magazine noted that Playing in the Dark was among Morrison's most-assigned texts on U.S. college campuses, together with several of her novels and her 1993 Nobel Prize lecture.) Lyn Innes wrote in the Guardian obituary of Morrison, "Her 1990 series of Massey lectures at Harvard were published as Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), and explore the construction of a 'non-white Africanist presence and personae' in the works of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Cather and Hemingway, arguing that 'all of us are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes'." Before the third novel of the Beloved Trilogy was published, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. The citation praised her as an author "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality". She was the first Black woman of any nationality to win the prize. In her acceptance speech, Morrison said: "We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives." In her Nobel lecture, Morrison talked about the power of storytelling. To make her point, she told a story. She spoke about a blind, old, Black woman who is approached by a group of young people. They demand of her, "Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? ... Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story." Morrison received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Howard University during its Charter Day celebration in 1995. After the ceremony, she delivered the speech "The First Solution", excerpts of which were later published as an essay titled "Racism and Fascism". The speech discussed the ongoing threat of fascism to democracy, which she said makes inroads through a series of ten steps. Scholar Dana A. Williams writes that Morrison lays out the argument that racism "is as much a strategy used to invoke fear and to uphold fabricated hierarchies as fascism". In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for "distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities". Morrison's lecture, entitled "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations", began with the aphorism: "Time, it seems, has no future." She cautioned against the misuse of history to diminish expectations of the future. Morrison was also honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which is awarded to a writer "who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work". The third novel of her Beloved Trilogy, Paradise, about citizens of an all-Black town, came out in 1997. The following year, Morrison was on the cover of Time magazine, making her only the second female writer of fiction and second Black writer of fiction to appear on what was perhaps the most significant U.S. magazine cover of the era.
