Toni Morrison

African American novelist, essayist, and academic (1931–2019)

Fame74.0
Momentum0.8
Writers rank#228

Source-basedFalling

Fame74.0
Momentum0.8
Writers rank#228
Wikipedia79.2K

Lived 1931–2019, aged 88United States

United States WritersWriter / Author

Wikipedia
111 languages
Cross-language footprint
Era
1931–2019
Aged 88
Known for
Beloved
1998

Summary

Updated 2026-06-08

She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the first Black woman to do so, for novels that traced the interior lives carved and scarred by American racism — work that made the unspoken consequences of the country's oldest violence impossible to ignore.

Biography

About

Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931, she studied English at Howard and earned a master's in American Literature from Cornell in 1955. After returning to Howard, marrying, having two children, and divorcing in 1964, she moved to New York and became the first Black female fiction editor at Random House in the late 1960s. Her debut novel, The Bluest Eye, appeared in 1970. Song of Solomon brought national attention in 1977 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Beloved, published in 1987, earned the Pulitzer Prize the following year and was adapted into film a decade later…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison

said29 Jan 1992

In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

— The Guardian (29 January 1992)

Toni Morrison

said1989

Beginning Beloved with numerals rather than spelled out numbers, it was my intention to give the house an identity separate from the street or even the city...

— "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature" in Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (Winter 1989)

Toni Morrison

said1989

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

— As quoted in Grace Notes (1989) by Rita Dove

Toni Morrison

said1983

Black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female.

— Black Women Writers at Work (1983) by Claudia Tate

Toni Morrison

saidSep 1981

Writing to me is an advanced and slow form of reading. If you find a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

— Morrison said this in her talk at the annual meeting of the Ohio Arts Council in Cincinnati in September 1981. Variants, unsourced:

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

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