Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, the second of four children in a working-class family. Earning degrees from Howard University (B.A. in English) and a Master of Arts in English (Cornell University), Morrison became an English instructor at Texas Southern University in Houston, then returned to Howard to teach English.  Later she became a textbook editor and then she went joined Random House where Morrison played a vital role in bringing black literature into the mainstream, editing books by authors such as Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Gayl Jones.  

She began her prolific writing career as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard who met to discuss their work. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), began as a short story for this group; she wrote it while raising two children and teaching at Howard.  In 1975 her novel Sula (1973) was nominated for the National Book Award.  Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), brought her national attention and was chosen as a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940. It went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award.  In 1987 Morrison's novel Beloved became a critical success, ultimately garnering the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  In the same year, she was appointed to a chair at Princeton University, the first African American woman writer to hold a named chair at any of the Ivy League universities.  She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.  Her citation reads: Toni Morrison, "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." In 1996 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.  She has been the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees.  In addition to her ten novels, she has penned children’s books, a play, and non-fiction texts.  

Morrison’s fiction opened the discussion of race, gender, and class in the U.S. for scholars, students, and community readers.  Her prose has generated extensive scholarly response.  Of the nearly fifty author societies that now make up the American Literature Association, the Toni Morrison Society has assumed a preeminent place in the academy. Its extensive membership and its public and scholarly programming have allowed it to move forward on national and international stages in supporting the teaching, reading, and critical examination of Toni Morrison's works. 

Toni Morrison believes that black people have a profound culture of storytelling to draw upon and that their stories must be heard.  Her own writings have represented the complexity and significance of black people’s experiences, languages, and ideas.  We are all the richer for her stories. 

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” 

― Toni Morrison, Beloved 

Locate on Walk:

• Stage Wall (Left Wall), 1-13