13 Facts About Toni Morrison—author of BELOVED: “My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.”

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Written By Chris Well

Learn some intriguing facts about the author of the spellbinding novel that transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.

Find out more about the award-winning novel Beloved—plus about the history of author Toni Morrison, how the late author continues to be important to future readers, and the funny way that Oprah Winfrey got in touch to make a movie.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved is a ghost story that serves an unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, from acclaimed Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison (1931-2019). Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Beloved
By Toni Morrison
Vintage International

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Below, find out about study guides that focus on Beloved. Also find links for info about banned books and other great authors.

About the Author

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She wrote several novels, including the critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her novel Beloved (1987) won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a major movie. Morrison was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, in 2012 by President Barack Obama.

Ms. Morrison told the New York Times that unlike some authors, who dislike being labeled, she doesn’t mind being called a Black writer, or even a Black woman writer. “I’ve decided to define that, rather than having it be defined for me…I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither. I really do. So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.”

13 Facts About Toni Morrison—author of BELOVED

#1 Toni Morrion developed a passion for literature as a young girl.

Raising little Toni Morrison, her parents taught her folktales, ghost stories, and songs with African-American roots to help her develop her background and language. Consequently, she became passionate about books and she read a lot when she was young. Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy were only two of the authors she adored.

Source: Discover Walks

#2 Before she became a novelist, Toni Morison was a college professor.

Morrison began teaching English at Texas Southern University. She then went to Howard University as a professor, where she taught Stokely Carmichael, a young civil rights activist. Howard University is also where she met her husband Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect. (They were later divorced.)

Source: BookRiot

#3 Toni Morrison also worked as a book editor at Random House Books (as the first female Black American editor at the company).

From 1967 to 1983, Morrison worked for book publisher Random House in New York. As an editor at Random House—the first female Black American editor in company history—she promoted the works of Black authors, including Muhammed Ali and Angela Davis.

Sources: BookRiot and CBC

#4 Toni Morrison was 39 years old when she published her first book.

In 1961, Morrison began working on her first novel as part of a writer’s group at Howard University. That novel—The Bluest Eye—wasn’t published until 1970, when Morrison was 39.

The Bluest Eye revolves around a young African-American girl named Pecola who imagines her life would be less difficult if she could only have blue eyes. The novel received positive reviews (including one from The New York Times) and has since shown up on many university reading lists.

“When I wrote The Bluest Eye, I came at it not as a writer but as a reader—and such a story didn’t exist,” Morrison said. “Every little homely Black girl was a joke or didn’t exist in literature. And I was eager to read a story where racism really hurt and can destroy you.”

Source: BookRiot

#5 Toni Morrison won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon—bringing more national attention to the author.

In 1978, Morrison won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon. The award brought the writer national attention for the first time, although she had already published two moderately successful books, The Bluest Eye (1969) and Sula (1973). Morrison went on to win the Pulitzer in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Source: History.com

#6 Toni Morrison’s 1988 novel Beloved won a Pulitzer Prize.

Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved is considered by many to be her true masterpiece. The novel follows Sethe, a woman who was formally enslaved. She’s haunted, quite literally, by the decisions she had to make when escaping slavery. This heartbreaking novel of survival, love, and the supernatural won many awards, including the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Source: BookRiot

#7 Oprah Winfrey was such a fan of Beloved that she quickly insisted the novel should be adapted for the big screen.

Oprah Winfrey read the book Beloved when it was published in 1987—and quickly felt the urge to talk with the author. But Morrison’s phone number was unlisted. This was before social media—so, this is what Winfrey did: She called the fire department in Morrison’s New Jersey town and told them to “call Toni and tell her Oprah called.” Morrison got back to her that very evening—and they discussed the possibility of a movie.

It took Winfrey 11 years to adapt Morrison’s book Beloved into a movie—the only major film adaptation of one of Morrison’s books. Co-produced by Winfrey, the 1998 movie was directed by Jonathan Demme and starred Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, and Thandiwe Newton.

During promotion of the film, Newton talked to Vogue magazine about Winfrey: “Here we were working on this project with the heavy underbelly of political and social realism, and she managed to lighten things up ... I’ve worked with a lot of good actors, and I know Oprah hasn’t made many films. I was stunned. She’s a very strong technical actress and it’s because she’s so smart. She’s acute. She’s got a mind like a razor blade.”

Sources: Vanity Fair and CBC and Vogue

#8 Toni Morrison was the first African-American woman to receive a Nobel Prize in literature.

In 1993, the author received the Nobel Prize in Literature, honoring everything Morrison contributed to literature. The first African American woman to ever receive this prize, Morrison’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize has become an acclaimed work of literature in and of itself.

“We die,” she said in her speech. “That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

The committee praised Morrison’s work for its “visionary force and poetic import, giv[ing] life to an essential aspect of American reality.”

Morrison remains the sole Black female recipient of a Nobel Prize in Literature. An exhibition at Princeton University, where Morrison was a professor, commemorates the 30th anniversary of her win.

The exhibition Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory features the late author’s archives at Princeton University. Dozens of pages are on display, most of them waterlogged and brown from burning.

Curator Autumn Womack says, “These are the fire-singed pieces from the house fire. I wanted visitors to think about the archive as something that is both fragile but also endures.”

In 1993, Morrison’s house accidentally burned down—the same year she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. A team of archivists saved Morrison’s work.

Womack says there are more than 400 boxes of material in the archives. “I really do believe that archives and collections are always telling us new stories. The day before the show opened, I was still adding things and taking things away, much to the joy of the archivists.”

Sources: BookRiot and NPR

#9 Toni Morrison wrote whenever and on whatever she could.

When ideas came to the author, Morrison wrote them down—no matter where she was. “When she was an editor at Random House, she found the time to write in day planners,” says exhibit curator Autumn Womack. Several pages of her work that were in a fire at her New York home in 1993 are also on display. “A ton of her research files were destroyed. She was teaching here at the time, but they were able to conserve and preserve a bunch of the material,” Womack shares. “It's where we see her doing multiple kinds of writing and work at the very same time.”

Source: Ebony Magazine

#10 Morrison was committed to writing for Black readers—rather than writing experiences about Black characters through what she called the “white gaze.”

Thinking of the “white gaze” means you assume the reader is white. That is, the assumption that everything one writes is going to be judged by members of the audience who are, by default, white.

In Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, the author talked about writing without the “white gaze.” She said, “I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.”

Sources: CBC and PBS

#11 Toni Morrison won the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded the author with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. The award is given to 13 individuals “especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors” (according to the The White House Office of the Press Secretary).

Former President Obama was an admirer of Morrison as a person and as a writer. Upon her death in 2019, Obama tweeted:

“Toni Morrison was a national treasure, as good a storyteller, as captivating, in person as she was on the page. Her writing was a beautiful, meaningful challenge to our conscience and our moral imagination. What a gift to breathe the same air as her, if only for a while.”

Source: BookRiot

#12 Toni Morrison’s books are often the target of book bans.

According to the American Library Association (ALA), Morison’s novel The Bluest Eye is one of the most frequently banned books, due to: “offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, [and] violence.”

In fact, Morrison’s works are regulars on ALA’s annual list of the top 10 most challenged books. The Bluest Eye has appeared several times, in 2006, 2013, 2014, and 2020. Beloved, Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1987 novel, appears on the 2006 and 2012 lists. In the mid-1990s, Song of Solomon was repeatedly challenged in school districts in Colorado, Florida, and Georgia for “inappropriate” and “explicit” material.

Scholars say one reason Morrison’s books are controversial is because they center on dark moments in American history that can be uncomfortable for some people to talk about.

“What she tried to do is convey the trauma of the legacy of slavery to her readers. That is a violent legacy,” says Emily Knox, author of Book Banning in 21st-Century America, of Morrison’s body of work. “Her books do not sugarcoat or use euphemisms. And that is actually what people have trouble with.”

Sources: BookRiot and TIME

#13 The U.S. Postal Service is honoring Toni Morrison with a stamp.

The United States Postal Service is honoring Toni Morrison with her own Forever stamp. The design was unveiled at a ceremony at Princeton University.

“One of the goals of our stamp program is to raise awareness and celebrate the people who represent the very best of our nation,” says Pritha Mehra, chief information officer and executive vice president of the Postal Service, in a statement. “We honor Toni Morrison with one more tribute—our new stamp that will be seen by millions and forever remind us of the power of her words and the ideas she brought to the world.”

The ceremony featured a letter from former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama, which was read aloud, as well as a video tribute from Oprah Winfrey.

In her video, Winfrey spoke about the significance of the author’s work. “Toni Morrison’s books are in so many of our homes and abide in our hearts because she served as a catalyst for generations of readers over the years to understand the power of reading and words.”

Source: Smithsonian Magazine

Study Guides for Beloved

“As a novel set after the American Civil War, Beloved acknowledges the millions of lives taken on the Atlantic slave trade and recognizes the hardships that faced freed slaves. Moreover, Morrison encompasses the supernatural, community, self and women-empowerment, and overall culture of both post-Civil War and post-Civil Rights America.”—Study Guide to Beloved by Toni Morrison (Bright Notes)

“Beloved by Toni Morrison, which tells the story of Sethe, a former slave who was prepared to commit a horrific crime rather than be forced back into slavery with her children. The novel explores the aftermath of her actions, and starkly illustrates the devastation wreaked by the institution of slavery and the legacy of trauma it left for African-American families.”—Beloved by Toni Morrison (Book Analysis): Detailed Summary, Analysis and Reading Guide (BrightSummaries.com)

“Toni Morrison’s Beloved was published in 1987. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Inspired by the real-life story of a runaway African American enslaved woman named Margaret Garner, who killed her own daughter to prevent her capture and enslavement, Beloved tells the story of Sethe, a runaway enslaved woman who takes her daughter’s life in the same manner.”—Study Guide: Beloved by Toni Morrison (SuperSummary)

Chris Well

Chris Well been a writer pretty much his entire life. (Well, since his childhood.) Over the years, he has worked in newspapers, magazines, radio, and books. He now is the chief of the website Monster Complex, celebrating monster stories in lit and pop culture. He also writes horror comedy fiction that embraces Universal Monsters, 1960s sitcoms, 1980s action movies, and the X-Files.

https://chriswell.substack.com/
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