Toni Morrison was an American novelist, essayist, editor, and professor. Her contributions to literature were recognized worldwide when she received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison attended Howard University and Cornell University in the 1950s before becoming the first black woman fiction editor at the publishing giant Random House. In 1970 she published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, and proceeded to publish a string of novels that garnered critical acclaim, along with the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 2012, President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Morrison's...
