The Nobel laureate who chronicled the black experience

Toni Morrison gave voice to millions of people who had long been relegated to the margins of American literature and life. With poetic and often painful language, the Nobel Prize–winning author placed African-Americans—particularly women—at the heart of her 11 novels. Many of Morrison’s characters were tortured but proud figures who were, she said, “unavailable to pity.” They included Sethe, the runaway slave in Beloved (1987) who commits infanticide rather than see her daughter raised in bondage; Pecola Breedlove, a black girl who struggles with feelings of racial inferiority and longs for eyes like Shirley Temple in The Bluest Eye (1970); and Macon “Milkman” Dead III, who spends decades searching for his roots and identity in Song of Solomon (1977). Slavery and its brutal legacy coursed through her work. “Anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind,” Morrison wrote in Beloved, which was set in the 19th century but read as a metaphor for the 20th. “Not just work, kill or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore.” What drove Morrison to write about the African-American experience, she said in 2003, “was the silence—so many stories untold and unexamined. There was a wide vacuum in the literature.”

She was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, to a shipbuilder father and homemaker mother, said The New York Times. “Young Chloe grew up in a house suffused with narrative and superstition.” She listened to ghost stories and folktales told by her parents—both of whom were descended from slaves—and watched as her grandmother “ritually consulted a book on dream interpretation.” At school Chloe developed a love of literature, especially the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jane Austen, and went on to study English and classics at the historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C. Classmates struggled to pronounce “Chloe,” so she started going by Toni, from the baptismal name Anthony—patron saint of the poor and the lost—she had taken on converting to Catholicism at age 12.

Soon after earning a master’s degree from Cornell University she joined the Howard faculty, “where her students included the civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael,” said The Washington Post. In 1958, she wed Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect. “Their marriage was an unhappy one,” with Harold believing a wife should be subservient to her husband. “I was a complete nuisance to mine,” she said. Morrison started writing fiction to escape, said The Times (U.K.). “I wrote like someone with a dirty habit,” she explained. “Secretly, compulsively, slyly.” One early short story was inspired by a childhood friend who, Morrison said, confessed to losing faith in God because “she had prayed for, and not been given, blue eyes.” After getting divorced in 1964, Morrison moved with her two young sons to New York City, taking a job as a senior editor at Random House. Over the next two decades, Morrison would cultivate what she called “a canon of black work,” editing books by Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and Muhammad Ali, and African authors including Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe.

In her late 30s, Morrison began working on her own novels, writing “whenever she could find time,” said Time. She wrote at daybreak when her boys were still asleep, and would scribble out paragraphs on her steering wheel while stuck in traffic. Her debut, The Bluest Eye, was set in 1941 and inspired by the “Black Is Beautiful” movement that took off in the 1960s. “There was a time when black wasn’t beautiful,” she said. “And you hurt.” Her next novel, Sula (1973), focused on two childhood best friends whose lives radically diverge. Like many of Morrison’s books, Sula captured the importance of black sisterhood. It was “so critical among black women because there wasn’t anybody else,” she explained. “We saved one another’s lives for generations.” Nationwide acclaim came with Song of Solomon. It was picked as a main selection by the Book of the Month Club, the first novel by a black author to receive the honor since Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940.

But it was Morrison’s “fifth novel, Beloved, that proved to be her most celebrated work,” said The Hollywood Reporter. In a chilling feat of literary invention, Morrison gives words to the slain infant, who lives as a ghost with her mother—a symbol of the bloody history that continues to haunt African-Americans. “I am not dead,” says the child, known as Beloved. “I sit the sun closes my eyes when I open them I see the face I lost Sethe’s is the face that left me.” The novel was an instant sensation, spending 25 weeks on the best-seller list. When Beloved failed to win a National Book Award in 1988, 48 black writers—including Maya Angelou, Ernest J. Gaines, and Alice Walker—wrote an open letter protesting the oversight. Later that year, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the first of many major awards for Morrison.

She received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993, “the first black woman to be so honored,” and in 2012 was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the U.S., by President Barack Obama.

The accolades didn’t cause Morrison to slow down. She won acclaim for the improvisational style of Jazz (1992), which was “set in 1920s Harlem and echoed to the strains of black jazz music,” said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). More novels followed, as well as three children’s books, collections of essays, and the libretto for Margaret Garner, an opera about the real-life slave who had inspired Beloved. Her final novel, God Help the Child, which explores childhood trauma visited upon a dark-skinned woman and how it shapes her adulthood, was published in 2015. “Word-work is sublime,” Morrison said in her Nobel lecture in 1993, “because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”