Celebrated author Toni Morrison, the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, died Monday.
“We are profoundly sad to report that Toni Morrison has died at the age of eighty-eight,” said her publisher Knopf on Tuesday morning. A cause of death was not immediately released.
Sonny Mehta, the current editor-in-chief and chairman of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, said, “I can think of few writers in American letters who wrote with more humanity or with more love for language than Toni.”
“Her narratives and mesmerizing prose have made an indelible mark on our culture. Her novels command and demand our attention,” Mehta said.
“They are canonical works, and more importantly, they are books that remain beloved by readers.”
Though she wrote many essays, Morrison was best known for her novels, including her first, The Bluest Eye, which took the literary world by storm and led to other works such as Song of Solomon, Sula, and Tar Baby.
Morrison’s Beloved, which was considered by some to be her magnum opus, won the writer the highly coveted Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1988. The work was adapted for the big screen in 1998 in a film helmed by Jonathan Demme, starring Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, Thandie Newton, and Kimberly Elise.
She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 in recognition of her entire writing career, becoming the first black woman to receive that prestigious honor.
Morrison, whose birth name was Chloe Anthony Wofford, was born in Lorain, Ohio, in February of 1931.
A lifelong reader, the legendary author earned her bachelor’s degree from Howard University in English in the early 1950s. Afterward, she pursued a master’s degree in the subject when she attended Cornell University.
Released this past June, the documentary Pieces of Me: Toni Morrison, gave audiences a rare inside look at Morrison’s greatest works, as told from her perspective.
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Michael Blackmon is an entertainment reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.
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