Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was born in Ohio in February 1931 as Chloe Anthony Wofford to Ramah and George Wofford. Growing up, her favorite writers were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. She rose to prominence as a celebrated American author, editor, and educator. Morrisons has the distinction of being the first black woman to be won the Nobel Prize in Literature as well as the Pulitzer Prize. She is considered one of the twentieth century's most important American writers.

Morrison's debut novel, "The Bluest Eye," was released in 1970. Her subsequent works were "Sula," "Beloved," and "Tar Baby." "Beloved," her most famous work, ran twenty-five weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. It told the narrative of Margaret Garner, an enslaved lady who fled only to be pursued by slave hunters. By 1988, it had not received the recognition it deserved, and Maya Angelou (together with forty-eight others) wrote in The New York Times in protest. After two months, "Beloved" received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction as well as the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

She went on to publish "Jazz" (1992) and "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination" (1996). (1992). Morrison intended for them to be read together, thus they were dubbed the "Beloved trilogy." Oprah introduced "Beloved" to the big screen in 1998. She earned the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, before the last work in the trilogy was released.