Toni Morrison Thursday
Toni Morrison, Pulitzer Prize winning author, playwright, novelist, and academician, was born Chloe Anthony Wolford in Lorain, Ohio on February 18, 1931. She was the first Black American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Morrison earned the award for her novels, depicting the lives and experiences of Black Americans.
The second of four children, Morrison was raised in Lorain, Ohio. She was a voracious reader. As a pre-teen, she converted to Catholicism (her mother was a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal church) and took “Anthony” as her baptismal name after St. Anthony of Padua.
She attended Howard University, where she changed her name to “Toni,” and earned a B.A. in English. At Howard, she also joined the Alpha Chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority. She then earned her master’s degree at Cornell University in 1955.
In 1958, Toni married Jamaican architect Harold Morrison. They had two sons, but divorced. Following her divorce, Morrison moved to Syracuse and worked first for a textbook publisher as an editor, and then for Random House as an editor.
Her debut fictional novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1969. Morrison produced a prolific body of work, both in fiction and nonfiction, for adults and for youth, including Beloved, Sula, Song of Solomon. Before her death in August 2019, Morrison served on the faculties of several universities including Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, Howard and Princeton.
Her numerous awards, and contributions to American culture and literature are documented and preserved through a collection of her papers at Princeton University.
Roger M. Vallande, The Essential Black Literature Guide (1996)
Charles M. Christian, Black Saga: The African American Experience (1995)
Toni Morrison Biography on Biography.com