Nobel-awarded novelist Morrison dies
Toni Morrison, the 1993 Nobel laureate in literature, whose acclaimed, best-selling work explored black identity in America and in particular the experience of black women, died Monday in New York City. She was 88.
Her death, at Montefiore Medical Center, was announced by her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. A spokesman said the cause was complications of pneumonia. Morrison lived in Grand View-on-Hudson, N.Y.
The first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, Morrison was the author of 11 novels as well as children’s books and essay collections. Among them were celebrated works like Song of Solomon, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977, and Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Other laurels include the National Humanities Medal in 2000 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented in 2012 by President Barack Obama.
“Her writing was not just beautiful but meaningful — a challenge to our conscience and a call to greater empathy,” Obama wrote Tuesday on his Facebook page, The Associated Press reported. “She was as good a storyteller, as captivating, in person as she was on the page.”
Morrison was among the rare American authors whose books were both critical and commercial successes. Her novels appeared regularly on The New York Times best-seller list, were featured numerous times on Oprah Winfrey’s television book club and were the subject of myriad critical studies. A longtime faculty member at Princeton University, Morrison lectured widely and was seen often on television.
In awarding her the Nobel, the Swedish Academy cited her “novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import,” through which she “gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”
In Sula, a woman blithely lets a train run over her leg for the insurance money it will give her family. In Song of Solomon, a baby girl is named Pilate by her father, who “had thumbed through the Bible, and since he could not read a word, chose a group of letters that seemed to him strong and handsome.” In Beloved, the specter of a murdered child takes up residence in the house of her murderer.
Throughout Morrison’s work, elements like these coalesce around her abiding concern with slavery and its legacy. In her fiction, the past is often manifest in a harrowing present — a world of alcoholism, rape, incest and murder, recounted in unflinching detail.
“Narrative has never been
merely entertainment for me,” she said in her Nobel lecture, according to the AP. “It is, I believe, one of the principal ways in which we absorb knowledge.”
Morrison’s singular approach toward narrative was evident in her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), written in stolen moments between her day job as a book editor and her life as the single mother of two young sons.
Song of Solomon (1977) was chosen as a main selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club, the first novel by a black author to be so honored since Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940.
Morrison published Beloved, widely considered her masterwork, in 1987. The first of her novels to have an overtly historical setting, the book — rooted in a real 19th-century tragedy — unfolds about a decade after the end of the Civil War.
Widely acclaimed by book critics, Beloved was made into a 1998 feature film directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Winfrey.
The daughter of George Wofford and Ella Ramah (Willis) Wofford, Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on Feb. 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio.
At 12, Chloe joined the Roman Catholic Church. She took the baptismal name Anthony. As an undergraduate at Howard University in Washington, she began calling herself Toni.
She earned a master’s in English from Cornell in 1955. She taught English for two years at Texas Southern University, a historically black institution in Houston, before returning to Howard as a faculty member.
In 1958, she married Harold Morrison, an architect from Jamaica; they divorced in 1964.
After her divorce, Morrison moved with her sons to Syracuse, N.Y., where she took a job as an editor with a textbook division of Random House. In the late 1960s, Morrison moved to New York City and took an editorial position with Random House’s trade-book division.
Morrison is survived by her son Harold Ford Morrison and three grandchildren. Another son, Slade, with whom she collaborated on the texts of many books for children, died in 2010.