'Everybody was an individual whom she approved of or disapproved of based on her perception of them as individuals,' Morrison recalled. She said that she wasn't particularly aware of segregation growing up, but that her father 'was very, very serious in his hatred of white people.' Her mother mitigated that. Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from East Europe or from Mexico.'

' Morrison told Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 2015. 'I lived in a little working-class town that had no black neighborhoods at all. Her grandparents, like millions of blacks, left the segregated South for the North, during the Great Migration. Born Chloe Wofford, she grew up with tales being told all around her in her hometown of Lorain, Ohio. Morrison was 56 when Beloved was published in 1987, but she had been living with stories since childhood. A decade later, Oprah Winfrey produced and starred in a movie based on the book. Beloved was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988.

Its real-life inspiration was Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery and attempted to kill herself and her children - her 2-year-old daughter died - rather than be captured and returned to a plantation. Her masterwork, Beloved, was a 'once upon a time' based in bloody truth. Morrison's work focused on African American life and culture, and she dominated an industry in which depictions of black life were often limited and rooted in stereotype. That may be the measure of our lives.”įebru– /DWnElCpMKc- Alfred A. We are profoundly sad to report that Toni Morrison has died at the age of eighty-eight. 'Although her passing represents a tremendous loss, we are grateful she had a long, well lived life.' The consummate writer who treasured the written word, whether her own, her students or others, she read voraciously and was most at home when writing,' her family said. 'She was an extremely devoted mother, grandmother, and aunt who reveled in being with her family and friends.

Morrison's family, in a statement released by the publisher, said she died 'following a short illness' and surrounded by loved ones.

Morrison, who was 88, died Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, according to her publisher, Penguin Random House. In her signature, measured cadence, Morrison told the Swedish Academy she believed these were some of the first words we remember from our childhoods. When Toni Morrison received her Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, her remarks began with a reflection on the phrase once upon a time. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Toni Morrison was the author of Beloved, Song of Solomon and The Bluest Eye.

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