Toni Morrison, First African-American Nobel Prize Winner in Literature
Toni Morrison, originally Chloe Anthony Wofford, is an American writer noted for her examination of the Black experience—particularly the Black female experience—within the Black community. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and the Pulitzer prize in 1988.
Early Life
Toni Morrison was born on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, the second of four children from a working-class, black family, in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford. Her mother was born in Greenville, Alabama, and moved north with her family as a child. She was a homemaker and a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. George Wofford grew up in Cartersville, Georgia. When Wofford was about 15, a group of white people lynched two African-American businessmen who lived on his street.
Morrison later said: "He never told us that he'd seen bodies. But he had seen them. And that was too traumatic, I think, for him."
Soon after the lynching, George Wofford moved to the racially integrated town of Lorain, Ohio, in the hope of escaping racism and securing gainful employment in Ohio's burgeoning industrial economy. He worked odd jobs and as a welder for U.S. Steel.
Traumatized by his experiences of racism, in a 2015 interview, Morrison said her father hated whites so much he would not let them in the house. When Morrison was about two years old, her family's landlord set fire to the house they lived in while they were home, because her parents could not afford to pay rent. Her family responded to what she called this "bizarre form of evil" by laughing at the landlord rather than falling into despair.
Morrison later said her family's response demonstrated how to keep your integrity and claim your own life in the face of acts of such "monumental crudeness." Morrison's parents instilled in her a sense of heritage and language through telling traditional African-American folktales, ghost stories, and singing songs. Storytelling, songs, and folktales were a deeply formative part of her childhood.
She attended Howard University (B.A., 1953) and Cornell University (M.A., 1955). After teaching at Texas Southern University for two years, she taught at Howard from 1957 to 1964.
Career and The Nobel Peace Prize
Toni Morrison taught English, first at Texas Southern University in Houston from 1955 to 1957 and then at Howard University for the next seven years. While teaching at Howard, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. Their first son was born in 1961, and she was pregnant with their second son when she and Harold divorced in 1964.
After her divorce and the birth of her son Slade in 1965, Morrison began working as an editor for L. W. Singer, a textbook division of publisher Random House in Syracuse, New York. Two years later, she transferred to Random House in New York City, where she became their first black woman senior editor in the fiction department.
In that position, she played a vital role in bringing Black Literature to the mainstream. One of the first books she worked on was the groundbreaking Contemporary African Literature (1972). This collection included work by Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and South African playwright Athol Fugard. She fostered a new generation of Afro-American writers, and She also brought to publication the 1975 autobiography of the outspoken boxing champion Muhammad Ali, The Greatest: My Own.
In addition, she published and promoted the work of Henry Dumas, a little-known novelist and poet who, in 1968, had been shot to death by a transit officer in a New York City subway. Among other books that Morrison developed and edited is The Black Book (1974), an anthology of photographs, illustrations, essays, and documents of black life in the United States from the time of slavery to the 1920s.
In 1984, she began teaching writing at the State University of New York at Albany, which she left in 1989 to join the faculty of Princeton University; she retired in 2006. Morrison’s first book, The Bluest Eye (1970), is a novel of initiation concerning a victimized adolescent Black girl who is obsessed with white standards of beauty and longs to have blue eyes.
A work of criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, was published in 1992. In 1973 a second novel, Sula, was published; it examines (among other issues) the dynamics of friendship and the expectations for conformity within the community. Song of Solomon (1977) is told by a male narrator searching for his identity; its publication brought Morrison to national attention. Tar Baby (1981), set on a Caribbean island, explores conflicts of race, class, and sex.
Notable Work
In 1987, Morrison published her most celebrated novel, Beloved. It was inspired by the true story of an enslaved African-American woman, Margaret Garner, whose story Toni Morrison discovered when compiling The Black Book.
Garner had escaped slavery but was pursued by slave hunters. Facing a return to slavery, Garner killed her two-year-old daughter but was captured before she could kill herself. Her novel imagines the dead baby returning as a ghost, Beloved, to haunt her mother and family.
Beloved was a critical success and a bestseller for 25 weeks. The New York Times book reviewer wrote that the scene of the mother killing her baby is "so brutal and disturbing that it appears to warp time before and after into a single unwavering line of fate."
Canadian writer Margaret Atwood wrote, in a review for The New York Times, "Ms Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, Beloved will put them to rest."
The book earned Toni Morrison her Pulitzer prize. Beloved is the first of three novels about love and African-American history, sometimes called The Beloved Trilogy. She said they are intended to be read together, explaining, "The conceptual connection is the search for the beloved – the part of the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you."
The second novel in the trilogy, Jazz, came out in 1992. Told in language that imitates the rhythms of jazz music, the novel is about a love triangle during the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. That year she also published her first book of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), an examination of the African-American presence in white American literature.
Before the third novel of the Beloved Trilogy was published, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. The citation praised her as an author "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."
Also in 1998, the movie adaptation of Beloved was released, directed by Jonathan Demme and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey, who had spent ten years bringing it to the screen. Oprah Winfrey also starred as the main character, Sethe, alongside Danny Glover as Sethe's lover, Paul D, and Thandiwe as Beloved. The movie flopped at the box office. A review suggested that "most audiences are not eager to endure nearly three hours of a cerebral film with an original storyline featuring supernatural themes, murder, rape and slavery."
Film critic Janet Maslin, however, in her New York Times review "No Peace from a Brutal Legacy," called it a "transfixing, deeply felt adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel. ... Its linchpin is, of course, Oprah Winfrey, who had the clout and foresight to bring 'Beloved' to the screen and has the dramatic presence to hold it together."
Death
Morrison died at Montefiore Medical Centre in The Bronx, New York City, on August 5, 2019, from complications of pneumonia. She was 88 years old, and a memorial tribute was held for her in the St John, the divine cathedral of Manhattan in New York City.
At this gathering, she was eulogized by Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, David Remnick, and Edwidge Danticat, among others. Jazz Saxophonist David Murray performed a musical tribute. She was survived by her first son Harold Ford. Slade Morrison died of pancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, aged 45.