“Women are the real architects of society.”

Toni Morrison was a highly celebrated author whose work left a lasting impression during her lifetime and one that will endure for generations to come. As an editor and educator, Morrison paid it forward by amplifying Black voices within the literary community and beyond.

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio. Her parents, George and Ramah Wofford, instilled in her a deep appreciation for storytelling, music, and folklore. Lorain was divided by class rather than race, and she grew up among immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Reflecting on her childhood, Morrison said, “There were factories there, shipyards, steel mills, and people came from all over to work. Mrs. Gallini lived next door and the Terschaks on the other side. That’s the way it was, and I thought the whole world was like that.”

A gifted student, Morrison became the first person in her family to attend college when she was accepted to Howard University in 1949. Despite the proximity of liberal arts schools like Oberlin, just 30 minutes from her home, Morrison chose Howard because it was a historically Black university. She wanted to study among Black intellectuals. Along with excelling academically, she participated in the Howard Players theater group, the Modern Dance Club, and the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority.

During her time at Howard, Morrison encountered racial segregation for the first time. “It was my first time in the South; it was a shock to me. I didn’t know about skin privileges when I grew up in Ohio. We had one high school, so we were all lumped together. When I went to Howard University, when we went to town, it was segregated, and you had the colored signs on the buses.” She later reflected, “It all had to be a learning experience for me. How does it feel to hate yourself? I didn’t know anything about that powerful self-loathing.”

Morrison earned her Master’s degree in Literature from Cornell in 1955. Her thesis, Virginia Woolf’s and William Faulkner’s Treatment of the Alienated, explored alienation as the defining characteristic of modern literary protagonists, a theme that would later shape her own works.

After earning her Masters, Morrison began her long career as an educator, teaching English at Texas Southern University until 1957, and then at Howard University until 1964. She continued teaching throughout her literary career, holding positions at SUNY, Rutgers University, and Princeton, where she held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities from 1989 to 2006.

While teaching at Howard, she met Harold Morrison, with whom she would have two children, (Howard) Ford and Slade. Their marriage ended after six years while Morrison was pregnant with their second son. She rarely spoke about her marriage, later stating, “It’s just not interesting…The life of the mind is interesting, but all these other little foibles? Please.”

After the birth of her youngest son in 1965, Morrison worked as a textbook editor for L.W. Singer, a division of Random House. Two years later, she became the first Black female editor for fiction at Random House, a role in which she championed Black voices and helped reshape American literature. During her tenure, she edited and published works by Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, Huey Newton, Henry Dumas, and Gayl Jones. She also played a crucial role in bringing Muhammad Ali’s autobiography to publication and edited The Black Book, an anthology documenting Black life in America from slavery to the 1920s. While researching The Black Book, she discovered the story of Margaret Garner, which later inspired Beloved.

Morrison drew from her own life when writing her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), about the inner lives of poor Black girls growing up in Lorain, Ohio. She wrote the book in the early mornings while working full-time at Random House and raising two sons as a single mother. “I don’t think I did any of that very well. I did it ad hoc, like any working mother does.”

The Bluest Eye caught the attention of editor Robert Gottlieb, who worked with her on all but one of her books and played a key role in refining her storytelling. Morrison praised his editorial instincts as “uncanny,” crediting him with helping her loosen up and avoid preaching in her novels. Gottlieb, in turn, said of Morrison, “A writer of her powers and discrimination doesn’t need a lot of help with her prose… She’s such a strong writer, a unique writer, and people care about her work so much. What she does makes a great deal of difference.”

Morrison’s second novel, Sula (1973), examined female friendships and societal constraints. Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), a multi-generational family saga, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and cemented her place as one of America’s most significant writers. Her fourth novel, Tar Baby (1981), explored race, class, and identity through the lens of an interracial love affair set on a Caribbean island. It was her first book to feature a contemporary setting and received widespread critical acclaim.

In 1987, Morrison published Beloved, widely considered her masterpiece. Inspired by the real-life story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who killed her daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured, Beloved remains one of the most powerful examinations of slavery’s psychological impact in American literature.

When Beloved failed to win the National Book Award, 48 critics and writers, including Maya Angelou, publicly decried the oversight. Novelist John Edgar Wideman stated, “She has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve.”  In the letter, the writers praised Beloved, remarking, ”For all of America, for all of American letters, you have advanced the moral and artistic standards by which we must measure the daring and the love of our national imagination and our collective intelligence as a people.”

Morrison did receive the national recognition that she deserved in 1988 when Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Regarding the Prize, Morrison said “It’s true that I had no doubt about the value of the book and that it was really worth serious recognition. But I had some dark thoughts about whether the book’s merits would be allowed to be the only consideration of the Pulitzer committee. The book had begun to take on a responsibility, an extra-literary responsibility that it was never designed for.” She also said, “In the end I feel as though I have served the characters in the book well, and I have served the readers well, and I hope the Pulitzer people are as proud of me as I am of them.”

In 1992, Morrison published Jazz, the second book in what’s known as the Beloved trilogy. Inspired by the rhythms of jazz music, the novel takes place in 1920’s Harlem and explores themes of love, violence, and memory. Morrison considered Jazz to be her best work and said of the novel’s style, “I wanted the work to be a manifestation of the music that the characters heard. If the text was about jazz, it had to be jazz.”

In 1993, Morrison became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his ceremony speech, Professor Sture Allén praised her, stating, “In her depictions of the world of Black people, in life as in legend, Toni Morrison has given the Afro-American people their history back, piece by piece.” After being told that she had won, Morrison’s response to friend and poet Sonia Sanchez was, “Have you been drinking?” Later she wrote that she felt she had earned a “License to strut.”

Paradise, the final installment in the Beloved trilogy, was published in 1998. While Beloved examined the legacy of slavery and Jazz captured the vibrancy and turmoil of the Harlem Renaissance, Paradise explores the complexities of Black community, religion, and exclusion. Though Paradise received mixed critical reviews upon release and some found it more challenging than Beloved or Jazz, it has since been recognized as a deeply complex and thought-provoking novel. Morrison notoriously once responded to a reader who stated that they found her books difficult to read by quipping “Good. I find them difficult to write.”

In 2010, Toni Morrison suffered a devastating personal loss when her son Slade Morrison passed away at the age of 45 due to pancreatic cancer. Slade, a painter and musician, had been her creative collaborator on several children’s books. Morrison rarely spoke publicly about her grief, but in interviews following his death, she acknowledged the profound impact of losing a child and admitted that writing became more difficult afterward.

Toni Morrison never saw her identity as a Black woman writer as a limitation, viewing it instead as an advantage. As she put it, “I can accept the labels because being a Black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it. It’s richer than being a white male writer because I know more and I’ve experienced more.” She also stated, “Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn’t even interesting. I was more interesting than they were. I knew more than they did. And I wasn’t afraid to show it.”

Morrison was outspoken about politics as well. She supported Barack Obama, who later awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Morrison made it clear that her endorsement went deeper than his racial identity stating that she would not have supported him if that’s all he had to offer. In a letter to Obama she wrote, “In addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don’t see in other candidates. That something is a creative imagination which, coupled with brilliance, equals wisdom.”

In 2012, Morrison said “The power of the United States ought to be in its democratic principles. Its health. Its education. And that’s not true. We’ve been wiped out. And if certain political changes take place, it will be the kind that will be faster – it won’t be a generation or two. It will be quick. If the Republicans get their way. We don’t want to go there!”

After the 2016 election, Morrison wrote in an essay for the New Yorker, “So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble. On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters–both the poorly educated and the well educated–embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.”

In 2019, Morrison passed away at the age of 88. The loss was deeply felt and she was eulogized by many of those she inspired, mentored, and counted as friends, including Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Edwidge Danticat and others. Oprah Winfrey said “She was our conscience. Our seer. Our truth-teller. She was a magician with language, who understood the power of words. She used them to roil us, to wake us, to educate us and help us grapple with our deepest wounds and try to comprehend them…She was Empress-Supreme among writers. Long may her WORDS reign!” Author Jesmyn Ward wrote, “We wandering children heard Toni Morrison’s voice, and she saved us.” President Obama said that Morrison was “A national treasure, as good a storyteller, as captivating, in person as she was on the page.”

Toni Morrison’s writing gave voice to the complexities of Black life in America with unmatched depth and poetic grace. As she once said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” And, as Hillary Clinton remarked, we are all so lucky that she took her own advice.