Toni Morrison

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.

Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved (1987). The novel was adapted into a film of the same name (starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover) in 1998. 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 honor for achievement in the humanities. She was honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Morrison wrote the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, first performed in 2005. On May 29, 2012, President Barack Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

She died from unknown causes on August 5, 2019.

Life and career

Early years

Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford. She is the second of four children in a working-class, African-American family.[6] Her mother was born in Greenville, Alabama, and moved north with her family as a child. Her father grew up in Cartersville, Georgia. When he was about 15, white people lynched two black businessmen who lived on his street. Morrison 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 hopes 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. Ramah Wofford was a homemaker and a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

When Morrison was about two, her family's landlord set fire to the house they lived in, while they were home, because her parents couldn't pay the 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 and ghost stories and singing songs. Morrison also read frequently as a child; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. She became a Catholic at the age of 12 and took the baptismal name Anthony (after Saint Anthony), which led to her nickname, Toni. Attending Lorain High School, she was on the debating team, the yearbook staff, and in the drama club.

Adulthood and editing career: 1949–1974

In 1949, she enrolled at the historically black Howard University, seeking the company of fellow black intellectuals. The school is in Washington, D.C., where she encountered racially segregated restaurants and buses for the first time. She graduated in 1953 with a B.A. in English and went on to earn a Master of Arts from Cornell University in 1955. Her Master's thesis was Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's Treatment of the Alienated. She taught English, first at Texas Southern University in Houston for two years, then at Howard for seven years. While teaching at Howard, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. She was pregnant with their second son when she and Harold divorced in 1964.

After the breakup of her marriage, she began working as an editor in 1965 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 capacity, Morrison played a vital role in bringing black literature into the mainstream. One of the first books she worked on was the groundbreaking Contemporary African Literature (1972), a collection that included work by Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe and South African playwright Athol Fugard. She fostered a new generation of African-American authors, including Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Gayl Jones, whose writing Morrison discovered, and she brought out the autobiography of boxer Muhammad Ali, The Greatest. She also published and publicized the work of Henry Dumas, a little-known novelist and poet who was shot to death by a transit officer in the New York City subway in 1968.

Among other books Morrison developed and edited is The Black Book (1974), an anthology of photographs, illustrations, essays, and other documents of black life in the United States from the time of slavery to the 1970s. Random House had been uncertain about the project, but it got good reviews. Alvin Beam reviewed it for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, writing: "Editors, like novelists, have brain children—books they think up and bring to life without putting their own names on the title page. Mrs. 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."

Awards

• 1977: National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon
• 1977: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award
• 1987–88: Robert F. Kennedy Book Award
• 1988: Helmerich Award
• 1988: American Book Award for Beloved
• 1988: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations for Beloved
• 1988: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved
• 1988: Frederic G. Melcher Book Award for Beloved. A remark in her acceptance speech that "there is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby" honoring the memory of the human beings forced into slavery and brought to the United States; "There's no small bench by the road," led the Toni Morrison Society to begin installing benches at significant sites in the history of slavery in America; the first "bench by the road" was dedicated July 26, 2008, on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, the point of entry for about 40 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to British North America.
• 1989: MLA Commonwealth Award in Literature
• 1989: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Harvard University
• 1993: Nobel Prize for Literature
• 1993: Commander of the Arts and Letters, Paris
• 1994: Condorcet Medal, Paris
• 1994: Rhegium Julii Prize for Literature
• 1996: Jefferson Lecture
• 1996: National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
• 2000: National Humanities Medal
• 2002: 100 Greatest African Americans, list by Molefi Kete Asante
• 2005: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Oxford University
• 2008: New Jersey Hall of Fame inductee
• 2009: Norman Mailer Prize, Lifetime Achievement
• 2010: Officier de la Légion d'Honneur
• 2011: Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction
• 2011: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Rutgers University Graduation Commencement
• 2011: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Geneva
• 2012: Presidential Medal of Freedom
• 2013: The Nichols-Chancellor's Medal awarded by Vanderbilt University
• 2014 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award given by the National Book Critics Circle
• 2016 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction
• 2016 The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry (The Norton Lectures), Harvard University
• 2016 The Edward MacDowell Medal, awarded by The MacDowell Colony
• 2018 The Thomas Jefferson Medal, awarded by The American Philosophical Society 

Nominations

• Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children (2008) – Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?

Bibliography

Novels

• The Bluest Eye. 1970. ISBN 0-452-28706-5.
• Sula. 1973. ISBN 1-4000-3343-8.
• Song of Solomon. 1977. ISBN 1-4000-3342-X.
• Tar Baby. 1981. ISBN 1-4000-3344-6.
• Beloved. 1987. ISBN 1-4000-3341-1.
• Jazz. 1992. ISBN 1-4000-7621-8.
• Paradise. 1997. ISBN 0-679-43374-0.
• Love. 2003. ISBN 0-375-40944-0.
• A Mercy. 2008. ISBN 978-0-307-26423-7.
• Home. 2012. ISBN 0307594165.
• God Help the Child. 2015. ISBN 0307594173.

Children's literature (with Slade Morrison)

• The Big Box (1999)
• The Book of Mean People (2002)
• Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper?, The Lion or the Mouse?, Poppy or the Snake? (2007)
• Peeny Butter Fudge (2009)
• Please, Louise (2014)

Short fiction

• "Recitatif" (1983)
• "Sweetness" (2015)

Plays

• Dreaming Emmett (performed 1986)
• Desdemona (first performed May 15, 2011, in Vienna)

Libretto

• Margaret Garner (first performed May 2005)

Non-fiction

• The Black Book (1974)
• Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)
• Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (editor) (1992)
• Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case (co-editor) (1997)
• Remember: The Journey to School Integration (April 2004)
• What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn C. Denard (April 2008)
• Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word, editor (2009)
• The Origin of Others (2017)
• The Source of Self-Regard: Essays, Speeches, Meditations (2019)

Articles

• "Introduction." Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. [1885] The Oxford Mark Twain, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. xxxii–xli.