Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison saw writing as a liberating experience.

“I know how to write forever. I don’t think I could have happily stayed here in the world if I did not have a way of thinking about it, which is what writing is for me. It’s control. Nobody tells me what to do. It’s mine, it’s free, and it’s a way of thinking. It’s pure knowledge,” Morrison said.

The author of seminal novels on the Black experience in America, born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, she became the first Black woman to win a Nobel Prize in literature.

She authored 11 novels, including “Beloved,” “Song of Solomon” and “Sula,” as well as children’s books and essays.

In her first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” Morrison depicted a young Black girl who wishes she had blue eyes to fit in with the beauty ideals established by white people. Her most famous work was “Beloved,” a story about a formerly enslaved Black woman who kills her daughter to spare her the horrors of slavery. The book won Morrison the Pulitzer Prize and later became a film starring Oprah Winfrey.

Morrison didn’t publish her first novel until she was almost 40. She taught at Texas Southern University and Howard University, her alma mater, before becoming the first Black woman to be named editor of fiction at the publishing company Random House.

Her litany of honors and awards include a Jefferson Lecture to the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Presidential Medal of Freedom, bestowed in 2012 by former President Obama.

— Cristina Marcos