When Morrison was about two years old, her family's landlord set fire to the house in which they lived, while they were home, because her parents could not afford to pay rent. Traumatized by his experiences of racism, in a 2015 interview Morrison said her father hated whites so much he would not let them in the house. He worked odd jobs and as a welder for U.S. And that was too traumatic, I think, for him.' Soon after the lynching, George Wofford moved to the racially integrated town of Lorain, Ohio, in the hope of escaping racism and securing gainful employment in Ohio's burgeoning industrial economy. Morrison later said: 'He never told us that he'd seen bodies. When Wofford was about 15 years old, a group of white people lynched two African-American businessmen who lived on his street. George Wofford grew up in Cartersville, Georgia. She was a homemaker and a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Her mother was born in Greenville, Alabama, and moved north with her family as a child. Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, the second of four children from a working-class, Black family, in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford. Morrison was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020.

She received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on May 29, 2012. She was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year.

federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities, in 1996. The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience. Her work Beloved was made into a film in 1998. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Morrison became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. She earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955.

īorn and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987) she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. Quotations related to Toni Morrison at WikiquoteĬhloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist.

Toni morrison on sula