Born in the small Ohio town of Lorain, Chloe Anthony Wofford arrived in this world on February 18, 1931. Her parents were a respectable black couple who moved to the North to find better opportunities and escape the southern racism that lingered and grew in the South. She was the second of four children, all of whom learned about their Southern heritage while growing up in the industrialized North. She attended school with immigrants from many European countries, Mexico and other Southern blacks. They lived and worked side by side and it was not until she was older that she felt the effects of racism. After graduating high school in 1949, she attended Howard University in Washington DC where she earned a B.A. in English and then earning her Master’s Degree from Cornell University. During college she changed her name to Toni because of the difficulty people had with pronouncing her first name correctly. While at Howard she visited several places in the South with a repertory company she had joined. This was her first glimpse into the realities of her Southern heritage and she was able to see the atrocities her parents had left behind.

She became a professor of English at a Texas university and through the course of the late 50’s and a raging civil rights movement she learned that black heritage was now being taught and respected. She only stayed in Texas for a couple of years and in 1957 returned to Howard University where she accepted a teaching position. It was here that she met and married Harold Morrison in 1958. Throughout her teaching at Howard, many notable people crossed her path, some through University functions and others as students in her classes.

Harold Morrison was a architect and a Jamaican. He and Toni had their first son in 1961, but during her pregnancy with her second son she left her husband and her job, taking her son to Europe where they traveled extensively. The Morrison’s marriage ultimately ended in divorce and Toni took her sons back to Lorain, Ohio.

Her writing began as an outlet to her unhappy marriage when she joined a small writing group. It was here that the idea for her first novel was developed as a short story to share with the group, though unrealized at the time. After her divorce she took a job with Random House as an associate editor and continued her role as single mom. At the end of a day of work, and after having cooked, bathed, and played with her boys, she tucked them in bed and sat down to write in the few precious hours she had left to herself. By 1967 she was a senior editor with Random House in New York City. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970, followed by Sula in 1973, Song of Soloman in 1977, Tar Baby in 1981, a play called “Dreaming Emmett” in 1984, and Beloved in 1984 for which she won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and is her best known novel. She continued to publish and gain critical acclaim, winning awards and honors in almost all aspects of her life. During the 80’s she left Random House and returned to university life and in 1987, while teaching at Princeton University, she became the first black woman writer to sit as chair at an ivy league university.

Throughout the last 25 years Toni Morrison has achieved some of the highest honors ever bestowed on a black woman. Beloved was followed by more novels (including Jazz in 1992, Paradise in 1998, and Love in 2003), essays, and critical works, In 1993 she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, only the eighth woman to have ever achieved this and the first black woman. Toni Morrison continues to write and influence the world’s view of African-American culture. That little girl from Lorain, Ohio has become one of the most important writers of the 20th century and continues to share her knowledge and insight today.