Who

One of the most beloved and admired writers of the 20th century, Morrison was a professor at Princeton until 2006.

Backstory

The daughter of a ship welder, Chloe Anthony Wofford (she picked up the nickname "Toni," the shortened form of her middle name, when she was in college) was born during the Depression in Lorain, Ohio, where her parents had moved to escape racism in the South. The family valued storytelling, especially black folklore, and young Chloe read authors such as Tolstoy, Austen and Flaubert. After attending Howard University, Morrison earned her master's in English at Cornell and spent a few years in academia—she taught English at Texas Southern University and her alma mater Howard—before moving to Syracuse in the mid-'60s and working as a textbook editor. She decamped to New York several years later to become a senior editor at Random House, a job she'd hold onto for the next two decades, primarily editing African-American writers like Angela Davis.

Morrison was nearly 40 in 1970 when she published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, which explores the devastating impact of white ideals of beauty on a young black girl. While neither Morrison's first book nor her second, 1973's Sula, generated much attention, 1977's Song of Solomon won wide acclaim and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1981 she published the novel Tar Baby, a modern day interpretation of Shakespeare's The Tempest, and in 1986 wrote her first play, Dreaming Emmett, based on the lynching of Emmett Till. Her most celebrated novel, Beloved—about a slave woman who murders her baby to save her from slavery, based on the real-life story of Margaret Garner—followed in 1987; five years later Morrison published Jazz, set against the '20s Harlem Renaissance. In 1998 her novel Paradise appeared, and Beloved was turned into a film starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. Morrison's most recent novel is Love, and her ninth, A Mercy, is due from Knopf in November.

Of note

Although she's often described as one of the most celebrated African-American female writers in history, even without the qualifiers Morrison would have a front-row seat in the pantheon of great American novelists. Her multi-layered narratives address class, gender and race with an unparalleled intelligence and a harrowing frankness that has occasionally attracted reproach as well as admiration; in particular, her portrayal of male violence has led to accusations that her novels feed into negative stereotypes of African-American men. Nonetheless, Morrison's exploration of the black experience in America has earned her virtually every major award a writer can receive. She won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1987, and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993. In 2006, the New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best book in American fiction in the last 25 years. (She's also has had four of her books selected for Oprah's Book Club, more than any other writer, although that can be partially attributed to her longstanding friendship with the talk show queen.) Morrison joined the faculty of Princeton in 1989 as the Robert F. Goheen professor of the humanities. She retired in 2006 but remains a professor emeritus at the university.

Personal

The Nobel-prize winning author was married to Harold Morrison from 1958 to 1964 and had two children, Slade and Kevin. She hasn't spoken publicly about her romantic life since (saying only that it's been "satisfactory"). Morrison has released several children's books with her son Slade, including 1999's The Big Box and 2003's Who's Got Game? The Lion or the Mouse?

Habitat

Morrison's home in Grand View-on-Hudson, N.Y. burned to the ground in 1993, destroying original manuscripts as well as many of her awards. She now divides her time between a one-bedroom apartment on the East Side of Midtown and a converted boat house outside Nyack, N.Y.

Soundbite

In a quote that will follow him to his grave, Morrison dubbed Bill Clinton America's first black president: "Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonalds-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas."