Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019) was an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher and professor emeritus at Princeton University. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970.
A selected list of her publications include: The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of
Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1997), Love (2003), A Mercy (2008), Home (2012), and God Help the Child (2015).
She has also written a couple of adult fiction, short stories and children’s fiction.
In 1988, she won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for her novel Beloved, which went on 10years later, to be adapted into a film of the same name in 1998.
Some of her other awards were the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Norman Mailer Prize, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the first black woman to win the award. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government’s highest honour for achievement in the humanities. Also that year, she was honored with the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letter.
Morrison died Monday night at Montefiore Medical Centre in New York. She was 88.
