The volume of critical and popular acclaim that has arisen around the work of Toni Morrison is virtually unparalleled in modern letters. Toni Morrison has been hailed as "black America's best novelist and one of America's best." In 1993, she became the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and the first American woman to be so honored since Pearl Buck in 1938. In 1977, her Song of Solomon   won the National Book Critics' Circle Award, and Beloved   earned her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988.

Morrison grew up in a gritty steel-town suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, a community she first fictionalized nearly 40 years later in The Bluest Eye . She was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, the second of four children of George Wofford, a shipyard welder, and Ramah Willis Wofford. As a child, Toni loved the arts. She enjoyed ballet and hoped to one day become a dancer. Reading was among her favorite pastimes. Her early favorites were the Russian writers Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, French author Gustave Flaubert and English novelist Jane Austen. She was an excellent student and she graduated with honors from Lorain High School in 1949. Her parents sacrificed greatly to send her to Howard College, where she eventually graduated.

Toni was offered a job at Texas Southern University in Houston, where she taught introductory English. Unlike Howard University, where black culture was neglected or minimized, at Texas Southern they celebrated black heritage and introduced her to the idea of black culture as a discipline, rather than just personal family reminiscences. She attended Cornell University, where she wrote her masters thesis on William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. She returned to Howard as an instructor in 1957. Her students there included Andrew Young, Stokely Carmichael, Leroi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), and others who became leaders in the Civil Rights Movement.

Toni published The Bluest Eye   to respectable reviews in 1970 and shortly thereafter she become an editor with Random House. Over some 18 years, Morrison acquired and edited books by Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and other black women authors. She also edited Muhammad Ali. Her next book, Song of Solomon , was the first novel written by an African American to be chosen as a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection since Richard Wright's "Native Son" in 1940. It won the National Book Critic's Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Morrison was also appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the National Council on the Arts. In 1981 she published her fourth novel, Tar Baby , where for the first time she describes interaction between black and white characters.

Morrison resigned from Random House in 1983 to write full-time. That career move paid off just five years later in 1988, when she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved . In 1993, the Swedish Academy honored Morrison with the Nobel Prize in Literature, lauding her for the "visionary force and poetic import" of her novels.

In 1987, Toni Morrison was named the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University. She became the first black woman writer to hold a named chair at an Ivy League University. She taught creative writing and also took part in the African-American studies, American studies and women's studies programs. She also started her next novel, Jazz , about life in the 1920s. The book was published in 1992. In 1993, Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was the eighth woman and the first black woman to do so. Some 12 years in the making, the movie version of Morrison's Beloved , directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover, premiered in 1998. Toni Morrison published her seventh and most recent novel, Paradise , in early 1998.

But don't let all these awards, or the fact that Morrison now teaches at Princeton, put you off. She doesn't write the kind of academic novels that are often so prized by critics and awards committees but avoided by passionate readers. In her own words, she writes "village" or "peasant" literature about the American black experience and culture. But she does so with language of such lyrical power and such vivid dialogue that, regardless of her subject, reading her words is a genuine pleasure.

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