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Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931. She was a Nobel Prize-winning novelist most famous for her exploration of the Black experience, particularly the Black female experience. She grew up in the Midwest and developed a deep love of storytelling and folklore from a young age. She credited her family and upbringing for her love and appreciation of Black culture. She received her undergraduate degree from Howard University in 1953 and her master’s degree from Cornell University in 1955. Morrison was married to Jamaican architect Harold Morrison from 1958 to 1964, and the couple had two sons. She became the first African American female fiction editor at Random House in New York. Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1987 novel Beloved in 1988. In 1993. She then became the first African American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, which was the same year that Beloved was adapted into a film starring Oprah Winfrey.

Morrison is known for her deft examination of the Black experience. She often covered themes of injustice, oppression, racism, and identity with her captivating, poetic prose. Morrison’s body of work is extensive, including ten novels, seven works of nonfiction, two plays, and three children’s stories. “Recitatif” is her only short story. Morrison wrote that with “Recitatif” she was creating “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.” Morrison was the chair of the Humanities Department at Princeton University from 1989 until her retirement in 2006. She was a gifted essayist and sought-after speaker. Among her many accolades, Morrison was granted an honorary degree from Oxford University in 2005, and she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2012. Morrison passed away in 2019 due to complications from pneumonia in New York City at the age of 88.

Next section Historical Context: Exploring Identities Through the Lenses of Race, Culture, and Politics

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