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Home · American Literature · Toni Morrison
Novelist

Toni Morrison

1931–2019 · Lorain, Ohio

The first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature — and the great novelist of American slavery's afterlife.

Nobel Prize 1993 · Pulitzer 1988

Life & Background

Chloe Ardelia Wofford was born in Lorain, Ohio in 1931 to a family that had left the South, and grew up with the folklore, ghost stories, and music her parents brought north. She studied at Howard and Cornell, taught, and then worked for nearly two decades as an editor at Random House, where she brought Black writers including Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and Angela Davis into print and edited The Black Book. She began writing fiction while raising two sons alone, publishing The Bluest Eye in 1970 at thirty-nine. Beloved won the Pulitzer in 1988 after a public letter of protest from Black writers when it was passed over for the National Book Award, and she received the Nobel Prize in 1993. She taught at Princeton for many years and died in 2019.

Beloved

Beloved
1987
Plot summary

Sethe, an escaped slave, lives in a house outside Cincinnati in 1873 with her daughter Denver. The house is haunted by the ghost of a baby. Eighteen years earlier, pursued by her former owner under the Fugitive Slave Act, Sethe cut her infant daughter's throat rather than let her be taken back into slavery, and was imprisoned; the child's headstone reads only Beloved, the one word she could pay for. Paul D, a man from the same plantation, arrives and drives the ghost out. Then a young woman calling herself Beloved appears, and moves into the house, and consumes Sethe's attention and then her body and mind, demanding an accounting that cannot be given. The community of women finally gathers to exorcise her, and Denver steps into the world.

Literary analysis

Morrison structures the novel around what she called rememory — the past as a place that persists and can be walked into again — so the narrative circles the central act, approaching and retreating, withholding it until the reader has been made to understand the conditions that produced it. The book is dedicated to sixty million and more, and it takes an actual case, that of Margaret Garner, to insist that slavery's arithmetic cannot be told in the register of realism. Her critical work is inseparable from her fiction: Playing in the Dark argues that American literature is shaped throughout by an Africanist presence it refuses to acknowledge, and her Nobel lecture, built on a parable about a blind woman and a bird, is a sustained argument about the moral responsibility of language.

Why Morrison Matters

Morrison is the central figure of contemporary African American literature and one of the most influential novelists in English of the last fifty years. Her fiction reoriented the American novel around Black interiority and community rather than around explaining Blackness to white readers, and her criticism supplied a method for reading race in canonical white American writing. Beloved has been named the best American novel of the last half-century in major critical polls and is standard on syllabi in American, African American, feminist, and trauma studies.

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Key Facts

Nobel Prize 1993
She was the first Black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Editor at Random House
For nearly twenty years she edited books by Black writers and activists, shaping the field she later joined.
Based on Margaret Garner
Beloved draws on the 1856 case of an escaped enslaved woman who killed her child rather than see her returned to slavery.
Playing in the Dark
Her 1992 critical book argues that white American literature is structured by an unacknowledged Africanist presence.

All Major Works

  • The Bluest Eye1970
  • Sula1973
  • Song of Solomon1977
  • Tar Baby1981
  • Beloved1987
  • Jazz1992
  • Playing in the Dark1992
  • Paradise1997
  • A Mercy2008
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