Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) was best known for her intricately woven novels, which focus on intimate relationships, especially between men and women, set against the backdrop of African American culture. She won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for her fifth novel, Beloved, the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature, and a 2012 Presidential Medal of Freedom. She released her eleventh novel, God Help the Child, in 2015. In 2016, she was awarded the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

Chloe Anthony Wofford, better known in the literary world as Toni Morrison, was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931 to Ramah and George Wofford. Her maternal grandparents, Ardelia and John Solomon Willis, had left Greenville, Alabama, around 1910 after they lost their...