TONI MORRISON
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford
(February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019)
nfluencer, Teacher, Novelist, and Writer
She is an African – American novelist. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Toni Morrison (Chloe Ardelia Wofford) was born February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah Willis and George Wofford. She is the second of four children in a working-class family.
As a child, Chloe read fervently; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. Chloe’s father told her numerous stories of the black community. According to a 2012 interview in The Guardian she became a Catholic at age 12 and received the baptismal name “Anthony”, which later became the basis for her nickname “Toni”.
She entered Howard University in 1949, where she accomplished all her studies and received a B.A. in English in 1953. She earned a Master of Arts degree in English from Cornell University in 1955, for which she wrote a thesis on suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. After graduating, she became an English instructor at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas (1955–57), and then returned to Howard to teach English. She became a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
In 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her citation reads: Toni Morrison, “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” She is currently the last American to have been awarded the honor. Shortly afterward, interestingly a fire destroyed her Rockland County, New York home.
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In May 2010, Morrison appeared at PEN World Voices for a conversation with Marlene van Niekerk and Kwame Anthony Appiah about South African literature and specifically van Niekerk’s 2004 novel Agaat.
Morrison wrote books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison, who was a painter and a musician. Slade died of pancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, aged 45, when Morrison’s novel Home (2012) was half-completed.
In May 2011, Morrison received an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Rutgers University–New Brunswick. During the commencement ceremony, she delivered a speech on the “pursuit of life, liberty, meaningfulness, integrity, and truth.”
Morrison in 2013
In 2011, Morrison worked with opera director Peter Sellars and Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré on Desdemona, taking a fresh look at William Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello. The trio focused on the relationship between Othello’s wife Desdemona and her African nursemaid, Barbary, who is only briefly referenced in Shakespeare. The play, a mix of words, music, and song, premiered in Vienna in 2011.
Morrison had stopped working on her latest novel when her son died in 2010, later explaining, “I stopped writing until I began to think, He would be really put out if he thought that he had caused me to stop. ‘Please, Mom, I’m dead, could you keep going …?'”
She completed Home and dedicated it to her son Slade. Published in 2012, it is the story of a Korean War veteran in the segregated United States of the 1950s who tries to save his sister from brutal medical experiments at the hands of a white doctor.
In August 2012, Oberlin College became the home base of the Toni Morrison Society, an international literary society founded in 1993, dedicated to scholarly research of Morrison’s work.
Morrison’s eleventh novel, God Help the Child, was published in 2015. It follows Bride, an executive in the fashion and beauty industry whose mother tormented her as a child for being dark-skinned, a trauma that has continued to dog Bride.
While teaching at Howard University from 1957 to 1964, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. She took his last name and became known as Toni Morrison. Their first son, Harold Ford, was born in 1961. She was pregnant when she and Harold divorced in 1964. Her second son, Slade Kevin, was born in 1965.
Morrison began working as an editor for L.W. Singer Company, a textbook division of Random House in Syracuse, New York. She moved with her sons as her career took her to different positions in different places.
Her son Slade Morrison died of pancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, when Morrison was halfway through writing her novel Home. She stopped working on the novel for a year or two before completing it; that novel was published in 2012.
Death and memorial
Morrison died at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, New York City, on August 5, 2019, from complications of pneumonia. She was 88 years old.
A memorial tribute was held for Morrison on November 21, 2019, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. At this gathering she was eulogized by, among others, Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, Michael Ondaatje, David Remnick, Fran Lebowitz, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Edwidge Danticat.The jazz saxophonist David Murray performed a musical tribute
Morrison was a member of the editorial advisory board of The Nation, a magazine started in 1865 by Northern abolitionists.
Morrison was honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which is awarded to a writer “who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work.”
The Bluest Eye her first was chosen in 2000 as a selection for Oprah Winfrey Book Club.
The Toni Morrison Papers are part of the permanent library collections of Princeton University, where they are held in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Morrison’s decision to offer her papers to Princeton instead of to her alma mater Howard University was criticized by some within the historically black colleges and universities community
Honors
1975: Ohioana Book Award for Sula
1977: National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon
1977: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award
1982: Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame inductee
1986 New York State Governor’s Arts Award
1988: Robert F. Kennedy Book Award
1988: Helmerich Award
1988: American Book Award for Beloved
1988: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations for Beloved
1988: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved
1988: Frederic G. Melcher Book Award for Beloved
1988: Honorary Doctor of Laws at the University of Pennsylvania
1989: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Harvard University
1993: Nobel Prize in Literature
1993: Commander of the Arts and Letters, Paris
1994: Condorcet Medal, Paris
1994: Rhegium Julii Prize for Literature
1996: Jefferson Lecture
1996: National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
1997: Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Gustavus Adolphus College.
1998: Audie Award for Narration by the Author for Sula
2000: National Humanities Medal
2002: 100 Greatest African Americans, list by Molefi Kete Asante
2005: Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement
2005: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Oxford
2008: New Jersey Hall of Fame inductee
2009: Norman Mailer Prize, Lifetime Achievement
2010: Officier de la Légion d’Honneur
2010: Institute for Arts and Humanities Medal for Distinguished Contributions to the Arts and Humanities from the Pennsylvania State University
2011: Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction
2011: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Rutgers University Graduation Commencement
2011: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Geneva
2012: Presidential Medal of Freedom
2013: The Nichols-Chancellor’s Medal awarded by Vanderbilt University
2013: Honorary Doctorate of Literature awarded by Princeton University
2013: PEN Oakland – Josephine Miles Literary Award for Home
2013: Writer in Residence at the American Academy in Rome
2014: Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award given by the National Book Critics Circle
2016: PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction
2016: The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry (The Norton Lectures), Harvard University
2016: The Edward MacDowell Medal, awarded by the MacDowell Colony
2018: The Thomas Jefferson Medal, awarded by The American Philosophical Society
2020: National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee
2020: Designation of “Toni Morrison Day” in Ohio, to be celebrated annually on her birthday, February
2021: Featured on “Cleveland is the Reason” mural in downtown Cleveland (with other notable Cleveland area figures)
2023: Featured on a USPS Forever stamp, designed by art director Ethel Kessler with photography by Deborah Feingol