Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) was born in Lorain, Ohio. Her real name was Chloe Anthony Wofford, and she was the second of four children in a working-class African American family. She studied English literature at Cornell and Howard Universities and worked as a researcher at Howard and Yale. She divided her time between New York City and New Jersey, where she taught at Princeton University. She authored the novels: "The Bluest Eye" (1970), "Sula" (1973), "Song of Solomon" (1978, awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award the same year), "Tar Baby" (1981), "Beloved" (1988, Pulitzer Prize the same year), "Jazz" (1992), "Paradise" (1997), "Love" (2003), "A Mercy" (2008), "Home" (2012), "God Help the Child" (2015). She also published essay collections such as "What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction" (2008) and "The Source of Self-Regard: Essays, Speeches, Meditations" (2019), and edited essay collections like "Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Construction of Social Reality" (1992) and "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination" (2007), which explore themes of racial consciousness and literary expression. In 1993, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for her body of work. She was also honored with the National Book Foundation's Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award in 1996 and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award in 2016. In May 2012, President Barack Obama, who was an avid reader of her work, awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House. She passed away in New York City on August 5, 2019, at the age of 88.