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Toni Morrison
1931–2019 · 88 years Tier I
She edited other people's books by day and wrote at four
When she was about two, the landlord set fire to the house in Lorain with the family inside, because her parents were behind on the rent. They laughed at him. Morrison said afterward that the laughter was the lesson, a way of keeping your own life in the face of monumental crudeness. Her father George welded for U.S. Steel and took whatever else came. She was baptized Catholic at 12, chose Anthony as her saint's name, and Toni stuck. Howard gave her an English degree in 1953, Cornell a master's in 1955 on how Woolf and Faulkner handled the alienated. She taught at Texas Southern and then at Howard, married the architect Harold Morrison in 1958, and divorced him in 1964 with two small sons.
In 1965 she took a job at Random House's textbook division in Syracuse, moved to the New York office in 1967, and became the first Black woman senior editor in its fiction department. From that desk she published Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali and Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones and Henry Dumas, and assembled The Black Book in 1974 out of three centuries of American scraps. Her own writing happened at four in the morning, before the children woke. The Bluest Eye appeared in 1970 and Sula in 1973. Song of Solomon in 1977 took the National Book Critics Circle Award and became the first novel by a Black writer chosen as a Book of the Month Club main selection since Native Son in 1940. She left publishing in 1983. Beloved followed in 1987.
On January 24, 1988, 48 Black writers and critics published a statement in the New York Times Book Review noting that Morrison had never received a National Book Award or a Pulitzer. Beloved took the Pulitzer three months later, and the question of whether the letter caused it has been attached to the prize ever since. She refused to write a memoir and told her Princeton students she did not want to hear about their little lives, which was a working rule as much as a joke: the material came from the archive and the country, not from her. Her son Slade, who co-wrote and illustrated her children's books, died of pancreatic cancer in December 2010 at 45. She was working on Home when he died, and it came out in 2012.
She died on August 5, 2019, at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, of complications of pneumonia, at 88. The memorial that November at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine brought Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Fran Lebowitz and Edwidge Danticat to the pulpit. Princeton, which dedicated Morrison Hall in 2017 and opened her papers in 2016 after a choice over Howard that drew objections, mounted an exhibition of her drafts in 2023. The books, meanwhile, keep getting pulled off shelves: the American Library Association ranked The Bluest Eye the tenth most challenged book of the 2010s, and it was back on the annual list in 2022.
Lifespan
Toni Morrison's life against the full span of the corpus.
Notable works
-
The Bluest Eye
book
Written at four in the morning while she edited full time 1970 -
The Black Book
book
Edited — three centuries of Black American ephemera 1974 -
Song of Solomon
book
National Book Critics Circle Award 1977 -
Beloved
book
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1988 1987 -
Playing in the Dark
book
On the Black presence inside white American literature 1992 -
Margaret Garner
other
Libretto for an opera by Richard Danielpour, premiered in Detroit 2005
Life in brief
with age at each point- 1933 aged ~2 Her family's landlord sets fire to their house She was about two. Her parents laughed at him rather than despair.
- 1953 aged ~22 Graduates from Howard University in English
- 1955 aged ~24 Finishes a Cornell master's on Woolf and Faulkner
- 1965 aged ~34 Takes an editing job at Random House's textbook division She moved to the New York fiction department two years later.
- 1970 aged ~39 Publishes The Bluest Eye
- 1983 aged ~52 Leaves Random House to write full time
- 1988 aged ~57 Wins the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved Forty-eight Black writers had protested the earlier awards that January.
- 1993 aged ~62 Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature The first Black woman to receive it.
- August 5, 2019 aged 88 Dies in the Bronx of complications of pneumonia
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