Nobel Prize in Literature

Year

1993

By

Toni Morrison

Place

Lorain, Lorain County ZIP 44052 · Lorain · Lorain County

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio. She studied English at Howard University, graduating in 1953, and earned a master's at Cornell in 1955.

In the late 1960s she became the first Black woman to be a senior fiction editor at Random House, where she pushed for African American literature. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, came out in 1970. Song of Solomon (1977) won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Beloved (1987) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. In 1993 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Black woman of any nationality to do so. The Nobel committee said her works are characterized by visionary force and poetic import, and show an essential aspect of American reality.

She held a chair in the humanities at Princeton from 1989 to 2006, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, and died on August 5, 2019, at 88.

• 1931-02-18: Toni Morrison is born in Lorain, Ohio. (Lorain, OH) source
• 1953: She graduates from Howard University. (Washington, D.C.) source
• 1970: Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, is published. source
• 1977: Song of Solomon wins the National Book Critics Circle Award. source
• 1988: Beloved wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. source
• 1993: Morrison wins the Nobel Prize in Literature. (Stockholm, Sweden) source
• 2012: She receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom. (Washington, D.C.) source
• 2019-08-05: Morrison dies at age 88. source

• First Black woman of any nationality to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• Edited and promoted many African American writers at Random House.

Literary achievement.

• Wikipedia: Toni Morrison

• Wikipedia: Toni Morrison