Toni Morrison 1931-2019
Publisher Alfred A. Knopf says Morrison died Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. She was 88.
Born Chloe Ardella Wofford, Morrison was best known for her critically acclaimed and best-selling novel Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among her other memorable and influential novels Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1997); the three books comprise a loose trilogy.
Just after the last of them was published, She was the first black woman to receive the Nobel literature prize, awarded in 1993. The Swedish academy hailed her use of language and her “visionary force.”
By then, she had already written six novels; she would go on to write five more.
Before she was a renowned author, Morrison was a ground-breaking editor at Random House, where she worked for almost twenty years, giving space to a generation of black writers including Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and Angela Davis.
She will be utterly missed.
