Toni Morrison: Nobel laureate who transformed American literature

In novels of intense poetry and power, she brought the experiences of African Americans, particularly women, out from the margins and into the cultural centre ground

Morrison was credited with conveying the nature of black life in America more vividly than any novelist before her (Getty)

Toni Morrison conjured a black girl longing for blue eyes, a slave mother who kills her child to save her from bondage, and other indelible characters who helped to transfigure a literary canon long closed to African Americans.

Morrison, who has died aged 88, spent an impoverished childhood in Ohio steel country, began writing during what she described as stolen time as a single mother, and became the first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. She placed African Americans, particularly women, at the heart of her writing at a time when they were largely relegated to the margins both in literature and in life. With language celebrated for its lyricism, she was credited with conveying as powerfully, or more than perhaps any novelist before her, the nature of black life in America, from slavery to the inequality that went on more than a century after it ended.

Among her best-known works was Beloved (1987), the Pulitzer-winning novel later made into a film starring Oprah Winfrey. It introduced millions of readers to Sethe, a slave mother haunted by the memory of the child she had murdered, having judged life in slavery worse than no life at all. Like many of Morrison’s characters, she was tortured, yet noble: “Unavailable to pity,” as the author described them.

Beyond her own literature, Morrison was credited with giving voice to black stories through her work as a Random House editor, beginning in the late 1960s. There was a “terrible price to pay”, she once remarked, for leaving the comfortable familiarity of Lorain, the Ohio town where she had grown up, for a career in an unwelcoming white society. But she wanted to participate in the creation of a “canon of black work”, she said. While raising two sons, and while pursuing her own writing in the hours before dawn, she shepherded into print works including autobiographies of the boxer Muhammad Ali and the political activist Angela Davis.

Morrison also helped to anthologise the writings of African authors including Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. She oversaw the publication of The Black Book (1974), a bestselling documentation of black life in America that included advertisements for the sale of slaves, photographs of lynchings, and images of churches and other spiritual places that had helped sustain black communities.

In addition to professorial duties at Yale and Princeton universities, Morrison was an essayist and lecturer, weighing in with withering force on race and its role in the events of her times.

Morrison, one of four children, was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931. Her parents, George Wofford and the former Ramah Willis, were transplanted southerners. A grandfather had been born into slavery. Morrison’s father held various jobs, including working as a car-washer, a welder and a construction worker, and the family moved frequently. At 12, Morrison converted to Catholicism, the faith followed by a branch of her extended family, and took Anthony as her baptismal name. For short, she became Toni.

Morrison in 1987 promoting her book ‘Beloved’, soon to become one of the most celebrated novels of all time (AP)

She enrolled in Howard University in Washington, receiving a bachelor’s degree in English in 1953 and, two years later, a master’s degree in English from Cornell University. She soon joined the Howard faculty, where her students included the civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael.

While at Harvard, she married a Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison. They had two sons, but their marriage was an unhappy one, in part, she said, because “women in Jamaica are very subservient in their marriages”. After divorcing, Morrison moved with her sons to Syracuse, New York, where she became a textbook editor before joining the Random House headquarters in New York.

In her unhappiness, she sought escape through writing. One early story was about a black girl who longed to have blue eyes. This story would form the basis of her first novel The Bluest Eye (1970). Morrison’s next book was Sula (1973), about two women from a black community called the Bottom who diverge in their decades-long friendship. In that work and others, Morrison said she tried to capture black sisterhood.

It was “so critical among black women because there wasn’t anybody else”, she said. “We saved one another’s lives for generations. When I was writing Sula, I was talking about a relationship that fell apart, because I wanted the reader to miss it.”

Morrison ventured into the experience of black men in Song of Solomon (1977), a family epic centred on Macon Dead, known as Milkman, who searches for his identity through his family lineage. Widely acclaimed, the novel, with its far-reaching storyline, was compared with Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I wanted to translate the historical into the personal. I spent a long time trying to figure out what it was about slavery that made it so repugnant, so personal, so indifferent, so intimate, and yet so public

Toni Morrison

After Song of Solomon came Tar Baby (1981), set on a Caribbean island, and then Beloved. The novel was inspired by the story of a real runaway slave, Margaret Garner, who was caught as she escaped from Kentucky to freedom in Ohio in the 1850s and slit the throat of her three-year-old daughter before being returned to her master.

“I wanted to translate the historical into the personal,” Morrison said. “I spent a long time trying to figure out what it was about slavery that made it so repugnant, so personal, so indifferent, so intimate, and yet so public.”

Beloved was praised as one of the most significant works of the century. In 1988, 48 black writers – among them Maya Angelou, Alice Walker and Ernest J Gaines – placed an open letter in The New York Times protesting about the fact that Morrison had not yet received the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize. That year, the Pulitzer went to Beloved. In 1993 came the Nobel.

Morrison receives the presidential medal of freedom from US president Barack Obama in 2012 (Getty)

Morrison’s later novels included Jazz (1992), set in 1920s Harlem; Paradise (1997), set in an all-black town in the western US; Love (2003), about the many lives affected by a deceased hotel owner; A Mercy (2008), an exploration of early American slavery; Home (2012), a portrait of a returning Korean War veteran; and God Help the Child (2015), the story of a black woman rejected because of the darkness of her skin, and the far-reaching effects of childhood pain.

Other works by Morrison included a play, Dreaming Emmett, written in the 1980s about the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till. She wrote the libretto for an opera, Margaret Garner, composed by Richard Danielpour, about the slave who inspired Beloved, and co-wrote children’s books with her son Slade Morrison, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2010.

For all the exploration of race in Morrison’s works, one of her most enduring messages was delivered through its absence. In Paradise, Morrison forced readers to guess which character was the white woman whose murder is foretold in the book’s first words.

“I did that on purpose,” Morrison said. “I wanted the readers to wonder about the race of those girls until those readers understood that their race didn’t matter. I want to dissuade people from reading literature in that way. Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It’s real information, but it tells you next to nothing.”

She is survived by her son Harold Ford Morrison.

Toni Morrison, novelist, born 18 February 1931, died 5 August 2019

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