America's greatest novelist—who wrote about Black life without apology and forced literature to expand its definition of the center.
Chloe Anthony Wofford was born on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio. She studied at Howard University and Cornell, then worked as an editor at Random House while raising two children alone and writing her first novel. The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and Beloved established her as the most significant American novelist of her generation. Beloved, the story of an enslaved woman haunted by the ghost of her murdered child, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and is considered one of the greatest novels in any language. In 1993 she became the first Black American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. She continued publishing until her mid-eighties. Morrison died on August 5, 2019. She never wrote to be understood by those outside Black experience—she wrote from within it, and the rest of the world caught up.
“If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”
“You wanna fly, you got to give up the thing that weighs you down.”
Anchored the Black American experience at the center of world literature with a body of work that is formally experimental, morally uncompromising, and permanently essential.
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