Toni Morrison, First Black Nobel Prize Winner in Literature

In 1958 she married Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison and in 1961 her first son, Harold Ford was born. She continued to teach while taking care of her family and also joined a writer’s group. Pregnant with her second child, she divorced her husband, left her job at the university, took a trip to Europe, then returned to Lorain with her two sons.

In 1964 she took a job as an associate editor with a textbook subsidiary of Random House in Syracuse, New York. During this time when her sons were small she started writing her first novel, a story she had written while in the writer’s group.

In 1967 she was transferred to New York as senior editor at Random House. She edited books by Muhammad Ali, Andrew Young, and Angela Davis as well as sending her own novel, The Bluest Eye to different publishers. Her book was published in 1970 but was not commercially successful.

Morrison was the associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Purchase while she continued to work at Random House from 1971 to 1972. She started writing her second novel, Sula, based on a friendship between two black women, it was published in 1973 and became an alternate selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Later excerpts were published in Redbook magazine and nominated for the 1975 National Book Award in fiction.

In 1976, and 1977 she lectured at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut and wrote her third novel, Song of Solomon, published in 1977. This book focused on strong black male characters, modeled after her sons and won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award.

President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the National Council of the Arts and in 1981 she published her fourth novel, Tar Baby, depicting interaction between black and white characters. On March 30, 1981 her picture appeared on the cover of the Newsweek magazine issue.

After working at Random House for almost twenty years she left that position. In 1984 she was named the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at the State University of New York in Albany where she started writing her first play, Dreaming Emmett. It was based on a true story of a black teenager killed by racist whites in 1955 after accusations he had whistled at a white woman. On January 4, 1986 the play premiered at the Marketplace Theater in Albany.

Her next novel, Beloved, was about a slave who in 1851 escaped with her children to Ohio, but tried to kill her children rather than be recaptured from her previous owner in Kentucky. Only one of her children died and she was imprisoned for her deed. Beloved, published in 1957 was a bestseller, and won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988.

In 1987 she was named the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University, becoming the first black woman writer to hold a named chair at an Ivy League University.

Morrison taught creative writing and took part in the African-American studies, American studies and women’s studies programs. Her next novel Jazz, about life in the 1920’s was published in 1992. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, becoming the eighth and the first black woman to do so.