In 1968 she moved to Random House’s trade division in Manhattan, becoming their first black woman senior editor. In 1964 Morrison and her husband divorced, and she took a job in Syracuse, New York, as a textbook editor for Random House. She later said it was the “powerlessness” she felt during her years as a wife and a mother of small children that led her to begin writing. While teaching at Howard, she married Jamaican architect Harold Morrison and gave birth to two sons. She taught at Texas Southern University for two years before accepting a teaching position at Howard.

In 1955 she earned a master’s degree in English from Cornell University, where she wrote her thesis on alienation in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. After graduating with honors from Lorain public schools, Morrison received a bachelor’s degree from Howard University in 1953. She has said she was born into a family of storytellers, and considers her father’s folktales and her mother’s singing as examples of the uniquely black language she absorbed as a child. Her grandparents were all originally from the South, and Morrison credits her family with giving her a rich foundation in the language and rhythms of African American culture. Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, a small, racially mixed steel town. In a 1977 interview, she said that it “seemed to Black people’s grace has been what they do with language.” Morrison is unparalleled in her ability to capture that grace on the page. Above all, Morrison is known for her rich, lyrical prose, which fuses the rhythms and imagery of African American speech and music with other literary influences to create a discourse of its own.

She has received numerous honorary degrees, prizes, and awards, including the Nobel Prize in literature. Morrison is widely recognized as one of the most influential American writers, and her novels are taught in literature, history, women’s studies, and African American studies courses across the United States and around the world. In this comment from a 1992 interview, Toni Morrison gives one description of the complex range of issues she explores in her work.

The search for love and identity runs through most everything I write.” “I’m interested in how men are educated, how women relate to each other, how we are able to love, how we balance political and personal forces, who survives in certain situations and who doesn’t and, specifically, how these and other universal issues relate to African Americans.

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