Toni Morrison Biography, Age, Family, Career, Net worth, Death & Social Media
Toni Morrison is a novelist, editor, and teacher of the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes. Her novels are known for their epic themes, their excellent language, and their richly detailed African-American characters that are at the heart of the stories. Among her most famous novels are Blue Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, Love, and A Mercy.
Toni Morrison has received praise in the world of books and honorary titles and, in 2012, received the Presidential Medal for Freedom.
Toni Morrison Early Childhood and Education
Born Chloé Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison was the second eldest of four children. Her father, George Wofford, worked mainly as a welder but at the same time had several jobs to support her family. Her mother, Ramah, was a domestic worker.
Toni Morrison later earned her parents for instilling in him the love of reading, music, and folklore, as well as clarity and perspective. Living in an integrated neighborhood, Morrison did not understand racial divisions until she was a teenager. “When I was in my first year, nobody considered me inferior. I was the only black in the class and the only child who could read,” she later told a reporter for the New York Times.
Committed to studying, Morrison learned Latin at school and read many great works of European literature. She graduated from Lorain High School with honors in 1949. At Howard Morrison University, she continued to take an interest in literature. She specialized in English and chose the classic for her minor. After graduating from Howard in 1953, Morrison continued her studies at Cornell University. She wrote her thesis on the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner and received her master’s degree in 1955. She then moved to Lone Star State to teach at The University of South Texas.
Toni Morrison Life As a Mother and Editor
In 1957, Morrison returned to Howard University to teach English. There she met Harold Morrison, an architect originally from Jamaica. The couple married in 1958 and had their first child Harold in 1961. After the birth of their son, Morrison joined a group of writers whom they met on campus.
She started working on her first novel with the group, which started as a short story. Morrison decided to leave Howard in 1963. After spending the summer traveling with her family to Europe, she returned to the United States with her son.
However, her husband decided to return to Jamaica. Morrison was pregnant with her second child at the time. She moved to live with her family in Ohio before the birth of her son Slade in 1964. The following year, she moved with her children to Syracuse, New York, where she worked for a textbook publisher in as editor.
Morrison later went to work at Random House, where she edited the works of Tony Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones, known for their literary fiction, as well as luminaries such as Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali.
Awards and Achievements
Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize Morrison became a professor at Princeton University in 1989 and continued to produce great works, including Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). In recognition of her contribution to her field, she received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first African American to be selected for the award.
The following year, she published a Jazz novel that explored conjugal love and betrayal in Harlem in the 20th century. At Princeton, Morrison created a special workshop for writers and performers known as the Princeton Atelier in 1994. The program was designed to help students create original works in a variety of artistic fields.
Death
Toni Morrison died on August 5, 2019, at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York.
Toni Morrison Twitter
— Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (@ToniMorrison) August 6, 2019