Toni Morrison: Author who articulated the black experience

Among book lovers, this author and Nobel laureate was a dominant voice in articulating the Afro-American experience and sensibility. She was also known for highlighting issues faced by black women as well as for introducing the elegance, empathy of African-American folklore to fiction.

Born February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, Chloe Ardelia Wofford on was one of the four children of Ramah and George Wofford. She hailed from a working class family and her father was a welder who also worked at other odd jobs, while her mother was a domestic worker.

Early life
Her family instilled in her a love for reading and storytelling and Jane Austen as well as Leo Tolstoy were among her favourite authors. She was a good student and graduated with honours from the Lorain High School in 1949.

She enrolled at the Howard University and completed B.A. in English in 1953. She then obtained a Master’s degree in English from the Cornell University in 1955.

Career
Appointed as English instructor at the Texas Southern University in 1955, she worked there for two years before returning to Howard in 1957 to teach English.

By 1964, she was married and had two children. However, her marriage broke up and she moved to New York to work as a textbook editor. Later, she found work as an editor at the New York City headquarters of Random House.

While working as an editor, she played a vital role in bringing black literature into the mainstream by editing books by prominent black authors like Henry Dumas, Angela Davis and Gayl Jones. She joined an informal group of writers and poets who held meetings where they discussed their work.

She was appointed to the Albert Schweitzer chair at the University of Albany in 1984. She held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at the Princeton University from 1989 until her retirement in 2006. She wrote a historical novel titled Jazz in 1992 and a novel about gender and class titled Paradise in 1997. She was selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities for the Jefferson Lecture in 1996. The lecture is the US federal government’s highest honour for achievement in the humanities.

Major works
Her 1977 novel, Song of Solomon, is one of her major novels. The book not only won the National Books Critics Award, but was also cited by the Swedish Academy in awarding her the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her novel titled Beloved, inspired by the life of the escaped slave Margaret Garner, was a critical success. It was later adapted into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey.

Awards & achievements
She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved in 1988. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 for her novels “which, characterised by visionary force and poetic import,, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality”.

Personal life
She married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect and fellow faculty member at the Howard University, in 1958. They had two sons. One of them, Slade Morrison, worked with her on several books and literary projects. Toni Morrison died of pneumonia on August 5, 2019, at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, New York City, at the age of 88.

Interesting Facts
Toni Morrison’s parents instilled in her an awareness about their heritage and language through folktales, ghost stories and traditional songs. So she developed a love for literature as a child.

When Morrison was a student at the Howard University, people had a hard time pronouncing the name Chloe. From then on, she started going by her nickname Toni, to avoid confusion.

In 1965, Toni Morrison began working as an editor of fiction at Random House in Syracuse, New York. She was among one of the very few African American editors at the publishing company.

Morrison was also was the first to hold a named chair at an Ivy League University. In 1987, she was named the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton in New Jersey.

She was halfway through writing her novel titled Home when her younger son, Slade died of pancreatic cancer in 2010. She stopped work on the novel for a couple of years. Slade had worked with her on many of her projects.