59 Facts About Toni Morrison

In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved ; she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Toni Morrison earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955.

Toni Morrison became the first Black female editor for fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s.

Toni Morrison developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s.

Toni Morrison's novel Beloved was made into a film in 1998.

Toni Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience.

Toni Morrison was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year.

Toni Morrison was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020.

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, the second of four children from a working-class, Black family, in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah and George Wofford.

Toni Morrison's mother was born in Greenville, Alabama, and moved north with her family as a child.

Toni Morrison was a homemaker and a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Toni Morrison worked odd jobs and as a welder for US Steel.

When Toni Morrison was about two years old, her family's landlord set fire to the house in which they lived, while they were home, because her parents could not afford to pay rent.

Toni Morrison's family responded to what she called this "bizarre form of evil" by laughing at the landlord rather than falling into despair.

Toni 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".

Toni Morrison's parents instilled in her a sense of heritage and language through telling traditional African-American folktales, ghost stories, and singing songs.

Toni Morrison read frequently as a child; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy.

Toni Morrison was the first person in her family to attend college, meaning that she was a first-generation college student.

Toni Morrison went on to earn a Master of Arts degree in 1955 from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

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.

In that capacity, Toni Morrison played a vital role in bringing Black literature into the mainstream.

Toni Morrison fostered a new generation of Afro-American writers, including poet and novelist Toni Cade Bambara, radical activist Angela Davis, Black Panther Huey Newton and novelist Gayl Jones, whose writing Morrison discovered.

Toni Morrison brought to publication the 1975 autobiography of the outspoken boxing champion Muhammad Ali, The Greatest: My Own Story.

Mrs Toni Morrison has one of these in the stores now, and magazines and newsletters in the publishing trade are ecstatic, saying it will go like hotcakes.

Toni Morrison had begun writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard University who met to discuss their work.

Toni Morrison attended one meeting with a short story about a Black girl who longed to have blue eyes.

The Bluest Eye was published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston in 1970, when Toni Morrison was aged 39.

Toni Morrison gave her next novel, Tar Baby, a contemporary setting.

Toni Morrison taught English at two branches of the State University of New York and at Rutgers University's New Brunswick campus.

Toni Morrison was a visiting professor at Bard College from 1986 to 1988.

African-American conservative social critic Stanley Crouch, for instance, complained in his review in The New Republic that the novel "reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries", and that Toni Morrison "perpetually interrupts her narrative with maudlin ideological commercials".

In 1992, Toni Morrison published her first book of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, an examination of the African-American presence in White American literature.

Toni Morrison was the first Black woman of any nationality to win the prize.

Toni Morrison spoke about a blind, old, Black woman who is approached by a group of young people.

Toni Morrison was honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which is awarded to a writer "who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work".

Toni Morrison continued to explore different art forms, such as providing texts for original scores of classical music.

Toni Morrison collaborated with Andre Previn on the song cycle Honey and Rue, which premiered with Kathleen Battle in January 1992, and on Four Songs, premiered at Carnegie Hall with Sylvia McNair in November 1994.

Toni Morrison returned to Margaret Garner's life story, the basis of her novel Beloved, to write the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner.

From 1997 to 2003, Morrison was an Andrew D White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.

In 2004, Toni Morrison was invited by Wellesley College to deliver the commencement address, which has been described as "among the greatest commencement addresses of all time and a courageous counterpoint to the entire genre".

Toni Morrison is eager to credit 'foreigners' with enriching the countries where they settle.

From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held the Robert F Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University.

In May 2010, Toni Morrison appeared at PEN World Voices for a conversation with Marlene van Niekerk and Kwame Anthony Appiah about South African literature and specifically van Niekerk's 2004 novel Agaat.

Toni Morrison wrote books for children with her younger son, Slade Toni Morrison, who was a painter and a musician.

In 2011, Toni Morrison worked with opera director Peter Sellars and Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traore on Desdemona, taking a fresh look at William Shakespeare's tragedy Othello.

Toni Morrison completed Home and dedicated it to her son Slade.

Toni Morrison was a member of the editorial advisory board of The Nation, a magazine started in 1865 by Northern abolitionists.

Toni Morrison took his last name and became known as Toni Morrison.

Toni Morrison was pregnant when she and Harold divorced in 1964.

Toni Morrison's second son, Slade Kevin, was born in 1965.

Toni Morrison stopped work on the novel for a year or two before completing it; that novel was published in 2012.

Toni Morrison died at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, New York City, on August 5,2019, from complications of pneumonia.

Toni Morrison was eulogized by, among others, Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, Michael Ondaatje, David Remnick, Fran Lebowitz, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Edwidge Danticat.

When he won, Toni Morrison said she felt like an American for the first time.

Toni Morrison is essentially postmodern since her approach to myth and folklore is re-visionist.

Barbara Smith's 1977 essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism" argues that Toni Morrison's Sula is a work of Black feminism, as it presents a lesbian perspective that challenges heterosexual relationships and the conventional family unit.

Toni Morrison consistently advocated for feminist ideas that challenge the dominance of the white patriarchal system, frequently rejecting the notion of writing from the perspective of the "white male gaze".

The Toni Morrison Papers are part of the permanent library collections of Princeton University, where they are held in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.

Toni Morrison was interviewed by Margaret Busby in London for a 1988 documentary film by Sindamani Bridglal, entitled Identifiable Qualities, shown on Channel 4.