Toni Morrison

Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, a small steel town on Lake Erie where Southern Black migrants mixed with European immigrants, Toni Morrison grew up in a family steeped in African American folklore, ghost stories, and song. Her father, George Wofford, a shipyard welder, worked three jobs simultaneously to support the family; her mother, Ramah, once sent a letter to President Roosevelt protesting the family’s substandard living conditions. Morrison was the first in her family to attend college, graduating from Howard University in 1953 with a degree in English, then earning a master’s from Cornell in 1955 with a thesis on Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. After teaching at Howard , where she married Harold Morrison, with whom she had two sons before divorcing in 1964 , she became an editor at Random House, where she championed the work of Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Angela Davis, and Muhammad Ali, reshaping American publishing. Her own debut, The Bluest Eye (1970), examined the destruction of a Black girl’s self-worth under the white gaze. Song of Solomon (1977) won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Beloved (1987) , inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who killed her own daughter rather than see her returned to bondage , won the Pulitzer Prize and is widely regarded as her masterpiece. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the first African American woman so honored. She continued writing novels, essays, and children’s books until her death on August 5, 2019, in the Bronx, at the age of eighty-eight.

In 1974, editing The Black Book, a scrapbook of Black American history, Morrison found an 1856 news clipping about Margaret Garner, an escaped enslaved woman who cut her daughter's throat rather than let a slavecatcher carry her back. She did not research further. That single kernel became Beloved.