Author and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison dies at 88
She is known for her seminal works of literature, such as “Song of Solomon,” which captured the black experience.
Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist who conjured a black girl longing for blue eyes, a slave mother who kills her child to save her from bondage and other indelible characters who helped transfigure a literary canon long closed to African Americans, died Monday at a hospital in the Bronx. She was 88.
Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for the publishing company Alfred A. Knopf, announced the death and said the cause was complications from pneumonia.
Morrison spent an impoverished childhood in Ohio steel country, began writing during what she described as “stolen time” as a single mother, and became the first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. Critically acclaimed and widely loved, she received recognitions as diverse as the Pulitzer Prize and the selection of four of her novels for Oprah Winfrey’s book club.
Morrison placed African Americans, particularly women, at the heart of her writing at a time when they were largely relegated to the margins both in literature and in life. With language celebrated for its lyricism, she was credited with conveying as powerfully, or more than perhaps any novelist before her, the nature of black life in America, from slavery to the inequality that went on more than a century after it ended.
Among her best-known works was “Beloved” (1987), the Pulitzer-winning novel later made into a film starring Winfrey. It introduced millions of readers to Sethe, a slave mother haunted by the memory of the child she had murdered, having judged life in slavery worse than no life at all. Like many of Morrison’s characters, she was tortured, yet noble — “unavailable to pity,” as the author described them.
“The Bluest Eye” (1970), Morrison’s debut novel, was published as she approached her 40th birthday, and it became an enduring classic. It centered on Pecola Breedlove, a poor black girl of 11 who is disconsolate at what she perceives as her ugliness. Morrison said that she wrote the book because she had encountered no other one like it — a story that delved into the life of a child so infected by racism that she had come to loathe herself.
“She had seen this little girl all of her life,” reads a description of Pecola. “Hair uncombed, dresses falling apart, shoes untied and caked with dirt. They had stared at her with great uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned nothing and asked everything. Unblinking and unabashed, they stared up at her. The end of the world lay in their eyes, and the beginning, and all the waste in between.”
Morrison’s Nobel Prize, bestowed in 1993, made her the first native-born American since John Steinbeck in 1962 to receive that honor. The citation recognized her for “novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import” and that breathed life into “an essential aspect of American reality.”
Morrison was “an African American woman giving voice to essentially silent stories,” said Elizabeth Beaulieu, a dean at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, and the editor of “The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia.” “She is writing the African American story for American history.”
Beyond her own literature, Morrison was credited with giving voice to black
stories through her work as a Random House editor beginning in the late 1960s.
“There are writers that we would not know had she not been in that very crucial position as a black woman in publishing,” said Angelyn Mitchell, a professor of English and African American studies at Georgetown University.
Morrison also helped anthologize the writings of African authors including Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. She oversaw the publication of “The Black Book” (1974), a best-selling documentation of black life in America that included advertisements for the sale of slaves, photographs of lynchings, and images of churches and other spiritual places that had helped sustain black communities.
In addition to professorial duties at Yale and Princeton universities, Morrison was an essayist and lecturer.
At the end of her life, her dreadlocks by then streaked with gray, Morrison often appeared to fill the role of a sage elder. In 2012, President Obama awarded her the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, recognizing her for “her nursing of souls and strengthening the character of our union.”
Morrison, one of four children, was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, on Feb. 18, 1931. Her parents, George Wofford and the former Ramah Willis, were transplanted Southerners. A grandfather had been born into slavery.
At 12, Morrison made the personal step of converting to Catholicism, the faith followed by a branch of her extended family, and took Anthony as her baptismal name. For short, she became Toni.
She enrolled in Howard University in Washington, D.C., receiving a bachelor’s degree in English in 1953 and, two years later, a master’s degree in English from Cornell University. She soon joined the Howard faculty.
While at Howard, she married a Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison. They had two sons, but their marriage was an unhappy one, in part, she told the Times, because “women in Jamaica are very subservient in their marriages.”
“I was a constant nuisance to mine,” she said.
In her unhappiness, she sought escape through writing. One early story was about a black girl who longed to have blue eyes.
After divorcing, Morrison moved with her sons to Syracuse, New York, where she became a textbook editor before joining the Random House headquarters in New York.
Morrison rewrote her old short story as the novel “The Bluest Eye” in part, she said, to counter the prevailing credo of the time, “Black is beautiful.”
“When people said at that time black is beautiful — yeah? Of course,” she told the Guardian. “Who said it wasn’t? So I was trying to say ... wait a minute. Guys. There was a time when black wasn’t beautiful. And you hurt.”
Morrison’s next book was “Sula” (1973), about two women from a black community called the Bottom who diverge in their decadeslong friendship.
Morrison ventured into the experience of black men in “Song of Solomon” (1977), a family epic centered on Macon Dead, known as Milkman, who searches for his identity through his family lineage. Widely acclaimed, the novel, with its far-reaching story line, was compared with Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
After “Song of Solomon” came “Tar Baby” (1981), set on a Caribbean island, and then “Beloved.” The novel was inspired by the story of a real runaway slave, Margaret Garner, who was caught as she escaped from Kentucky to freedom in Ohio in the 1850s and slit the throat of her 3-year-old daughter before being returned to her master.
“Beloved” was praised as one of the most significant works of the century.
“If she wrote only ‘Beloved,’ that would have been enough,” said Mitchell, of Georgetown, “because in that she is able to take her readers to a moment in American history that is unthinkable.”
In 1988, 48 black writers — among them Maya Angelou, Alice Walker and Ernest J. Gaines — placed an open letter in the Times protesting the fact that Morrison had not yet received the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize. That year, the Pulitzer went to “Beloved.” The Nobel came in 1993.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard University historian, remarked that she won the Nobel primarily for “Beloved” and her novel “Jazz” (1992), set in Harlem in the 1920s, whose voice he described as “combining Ellington, Faulkner and Maria Callas.”
Morrison is survived by her son Harold Ford Morrison of Princeton, New Jersey; and three grandchildren. Her other son, Slade Morrison, died in 2010.