First black woman to win Nobel literature prize, Toni Morrison, dies at 88
Nob el laureate Toni Morrison, a giant of modern American literature who sought to dramatise the pursuit of freedom within the boundaries of race, has died at the age of 88.
Her publisher, Alfred A Knopf, announced that Morrison had died on Monday night at Montefiore Medical Centre in New York.
Morrison’s family issued a statement through Knopf saying she had died after a brief illness.
They announced: “Toni Morrison passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends.
“She was an extremely devoted mother, grandmother and aunt who revelled in being with her family and friends. The consummate writer who treasured the written word, whether her own, hers tudents’ or others’, she read voraciously and was most at home when writing.”
Morrison was nearly 40 when her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1969.
By her early 60s, after just six novels, she had become the first black woman to receive the Nobel literature prize, praised in 1993 by the Swedish academy for her “visionary force” and for delving into “language itself, a language she wants to liberate” from categories of black and white.
Morrison helped educate her country and the world about the private lives of the unknown and unwanted. In her novels, history– particularly black history–was a hidden trove of poetry, tragedy and good old gossip, whether in small-town Ohio in Sula or big-city Harlem in Jazz.
She regarded race as a social construct, and through language founded the better world her characters suffered to attain, weaving in everything from African literature and slave folklore to the Bible and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
“Narrative has never been merely entertainment for me,” she said in her Nobel acceptance lecture. “It is, I believe, one of the principal ways in which we absorb knowledge.”
She won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for perhaps her bestknown novel, Beloved, in which a mother makes a tragic choice to save her baby girl from slavery.