Toni Morrison (Feb.18,1931- Aug 5, 2019) was widely  regarded as a premiere American writer of the modern era. In 1931, Morrison was born to a welder father and domestic worker mother. Both instilled in her the importance of education and the arts. She and her family lived in a mixed neighborhood, and not until high school did race relations start to affect her life. She graduated with honors, but her experiences affected her so deeply, they shaped her pending literature career.

In college, Morrison pursued her interests in literature. She graduated from Howard in 1953 with a degree in English and a minor in Classics. Two years later, she graduated with a Masters degree in Cornell University and returned to Howard University to teach in 1957. At the university, she workshopped a short story that eventually turned into her first novel The Bluest Eye.

After years of teaching and working for Random House, in 1970, Morrison published The Bluest Eye. This was the first of many of her books exploring American race relations, but it did not receive as warm of reception as her future novels.

In 1973, Morrison published her next novel, Sula. The novel was nominated for that year’s American Book Award. Four years later, she released Song of Solomon to a similar level of praise. Song received the National Books Critic Award.

Morrison’s stardom was rising, and it was rising fast.

In 1980, she was appointed to the prestigious National Council on the Arts. Although she published Tar Baby a year afterward to mixed reception, in 1987, Morrison hit literary gold with Beloved. The book cemented her place in American literature history. It won the 1988 Pultizer Prize for Fiction, and a decade later, Oprah starred in the movie adaptation.

Thanks to Beloved, a majority of Morrison’s work is now analyzed by English-speaking students across the world. In 1989, she started teaching at Princeton, and four years after her arrival there, she was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature because of her layered, poetic exploration of race in America. Morrison was the first African-American woman ever to win the award.

She was a prolific writer,  constantly drawing from historic experiences of people of color as the inspiration for her works. She’s also dabbled in children’s literature. Her latest book, God Help the Child, was published in April 2015 and was one of the most anticipated novels that year.