Toni Morrison dies at age 88
Literary giant was known for her ‘dignity and generosity of spirit’
Toni Morrison, the Nobel laureate whose seminal works highlighted the black experience, died Monday, leaving behind a profound legacy that stretches far beyond the written word.
“Toni Morrison has done for the American novel what Shakespeare did for theater — she is that important, she is that influential,” said Carla Kaplan, Northeastern University Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature. “There’s a certain sense in which she reinvented our relationship to the American novel, and certainly has reshaped what it means to engage with history and to engage with one another.”
Morrison died Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York after a brief illness, her family said. She was 88.
“Toni Morrison passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends,” her family said. “The consummate writer who treasured the written word, whether her own, her students or others, she read voraciously and was most at home when writing.”
Though Morrison was nearly 40 when her first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” was published, she rose rapidly in the literary world, writing 11 novels, along with children’s books and essays. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for “Beloved,” and became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
The daughter of a welder and a domestic worker, Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, near Cleveland. She was encouraged by her parents to read and to think, and was unimpressed by the white kids in her community. Recalling how she felt like an “aristocrat,” Morrison believed she was smarter. She was an honors student in high school, and attended Howard University to be among black intellectuals.
Boston University lecturer Mary Anne Boelcskevy, who teaches a class on Morrison’s work, described her prose as having a “lyrical” yet “forceful voice.” Boelcskevy recalled the first time she heard Morrison speak, admitting her “image of this incredible, strong, profound woman” was shaken by the author’s “delicate voice.”
“I was completely shocked at the time because I was used to this incredible, strong narrative voice she brings to all her writing,” Boelcskevy said.
Her literature “asks us to look at the most horrific parts of our past,” Kaplan said, but “her language is so extraordinary that we don’t look away.”
Over 15 years as a book editor at Random House, Morrison, a single mother, was “dedicated to raising up other writers, black writers, giving them more of a platform,” Kaplan said.
“Her legacy, it’s in her work. But it’s also in the example she set,” Kaplan said. Even as Morrison became famous, “She inhabited that role with the most extraordinary graciousness, the most dignity and generosity of spirit.”