Morrison, Toni (1931–)

African-American novelist. Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, Feb 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio; dau. of George Wofford and Rahmah Willis Wofford; Howard University, BA; Cornell University, MA in English; m. Harold Morrison (Jamaican architect), 1958 (div. 1964); children: Harold Ford Morrison and Slade Kevin Morrison.

Major contemporary novelist whose writing is a means of reclaiming her people's past; grew up poor in midwestern steel town of Lorain, Ohio; began career as a professor, 1st at Texas Southern University and then at Howard University; began working as a textbook editor for Random House in Syracuse, NY (1965); moved to New York City (1967) to become a senior editor, publishing the work of other African-American writers; continued adjunct university teaching alternately at Yale, Bard College and SUNY at Purchase; published 1st novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), followed by Sula (1973) and Song of Solomon (1977); left NYC to live on a houseboat on Hudson River (1979); after publication of Tar Baby (1981), was elected to American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; made the cover of Newsweek (1981), the 1st African-American woman to do so since writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston in 1943; ended career in publishing (1984) when she accepted the Albert Schweitzer Professorship of the Humanities at SUNY at Albany; published highly acclaimed novel, Beloved (1987); accepted professorship in the Humanities at Princeton University (1989) in African-American studies and creative writing; published Jazz and 1st book of essays, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992); also wrote Paradise (1998), children's book, The Big Box (1999), Love (2003) and the opera Margaret Garner (2003). Won National Book Critics Circle Award (1977); Named Distinguished Writer of 1978 by American Academy of Arts and Letters; appointed by President Carter to National Council on the Arts (1980); won Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1988); received Chianti Ruffino Antico Fattore International Award in Literature (1990); received Nobel Prize for Literature (1993), the 1st African-American to win the coveted award.

See also Danille Taylor-Guthrie, ed. Conversations with Toni Morrison (U. Press of Mississippi, 1994); Wilfred D. Samuels, Toni Morrison (Twayne, 1990); and Women in World History.