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‘You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down,’\u00a0 is the <\/em>famous quote of Toni Toni Morrison.<\/p>\n The world is mourning loss of a great writer, famed for having portrait the African life, culture and the turmoils there were reeling into.Toni Morrison’s real name was Chloe Ardelia Wofford; born in February 18, 1931. She was an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher and professor emeritus at Princeton University. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, she won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for Beloved(1987).<\/p>\n Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from\u00a0Howard University\u00a0in 1953 and went to graduate school at\u00a0Cornell University. Later, while teaching English at Howard University, she married Harold Morrison. They had two children and divorced in 1964. In the late 1960s, she became the first black female editor in fiction at\u00a0Random House\u00a0in New York City. In the 1970s and 1980s she developed her own reputation as an author, and her perhaps most celebrated work,\u00a0Beloved<\/em>, was made into a movie in 1998 by\u00a0Oprah Winfrey.<\/p>\n Morrison was awarded the\u00a0National Endowment for the Humanities\u00a0selected her for the\u00a0Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government’s highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Also that year, she was honored with the\u00a0National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. On May 29, 2012, President\u00a0Barack Obama\u00a0presented Morrison with the\u00a0Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, she received the\u00a0PEN\/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.<\/p>\n Toni Morrison was born in\u00a0Lorain, Ohio to Ramah (n\u00e9e Willis) and George Wofford. She was the second of four children in a working-class, African-American family.\u00a0Soon after the lynching, George Wofford moved to the racially integrated town of Lorain, Ohio, in hopes of escaping racism and securing gainful employment in Ohio’s burgeoning industrial economy. Her father worked odd jobs and as a welder for\u00a0U.S. Steel. Ramah Wofford was a homemaker and a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong>Lesson of Life<\/strong><\/p>\n When Morrison was about two, her family’s landlord set fire to the house they lived in, while they were home, because her parents couldn’t pay the rent. Her family responded to what she called this “bizarre form of evil” by laughing at the landlord rather than falling into despair. Morrison later said her family’s response demonstrated how to keep your integrity and claim your own life in the face of acts of such “monumental crudeness.”<\/p>\n Morrison’s parents instilled in her a sense of heritage and language through telling traditional African-American folktales and ghost stories and singing songs.\u00a0Morrison also read frequently as a child; among her favorite authors were\u00a0Jane Austen\u00a0and\u00a0Leo Tolstoy.\u00a0She became a\u00a0Catholic\u00a0at the age of 12 and took the\u00a0baptismal name\u00a0Anthony, which led to her nickname, Toni.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong>Adulthood 1949\u20131974<\/strong><\/p>\n In 1949, she enrolled at the historically black\u00a0Howard University, seeking the company of fellow black intellectuals.\u00a0The University is in\u00a0Washington D.C. where she encountered racially segregated restaurants and buses for the first time.\u00a0She graduated in 1953 with a B.A. in English and went on to earn a Master of Arts from\u00a0Cornell University\u00a0in 1955. She taught English, first at\u00a0Texas Southern University\u00a0in\u00a0Houston\u00a0for two years, then at Howard for seven years. While teaching at Howard, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. She was pregnant with their second son when she and Harold divorced in 1964.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As an Editor <\/strong><\/p>\n After the breakup of her marriage, she began working as an editor in 1965 for L. W. Singer, a textbook division of publisher Random House, in Syracuse, New York. Two years later she transferred to Random House in New York City, where she became their first black woman senior editor in the fiction department.<\/p>\n In that capacity, Morrison played a vital role in bringing black literature into the mainstream. Among other books Morrison developed and edited is\u00a0The Black Book<\/em>\u00a0(1974), an anthology of photographs, illustrations, essays, and other documents of black life in the United States from the time of slavery to the 1970s.\u00a0Random House had been uncertain about the project, but it got good reviews.<\/p>\n First writings and teaching, 1970\u20131986<\/strong><\/p>\n Morrison had begun writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard University who met to discuss their work. She attended one meeting with a short story about a black girl who longed to have blue eyes. Morrison later developed the story as her first novel,\u00a0The Bluest Eye, getting up every morning at 4\u00a0am to write, while raising two children alone.<\/p>\n The Bluest Eye<\/em>\u00a0was published in 1970 when Morrison was thirty-nine.\u00a0It did not sell well at first, but the\u00a0City University of New York\u00a0put the novel on its reading list for its new black-studies department, as did other colleges, which boosted sales.<\/p>\n In 1975, Morrison’s second novel\u00a0Sula(1973), about a friendship between two black women, was nominated for the\u00a0National Book Award. Her third novel,\u00a0Song of Solomon(1977), brought her national acclaim.<\/p>\n Morrison gave her next novel,\u00a0Tar Baby\u00a0(1981), a contemporary setting. In it, a looks-obsessed fashion model, Jadine, falls in love with Son, a penniless drifter who feels at ease with being black.<\/p>\n In 1983, Morrison left publishing to devote more time to writing, and lived in a converted boathouse on the\u00a0Hudson River\u00a0in\u00a0Nyack, New York.\u00a0She taught English at two branches of the\u00a0Sate University of New York\u00a0and at\u00a0Rutgers Univrsity: New Brunswick Campus.<\/p>\n Morrison’s first play,Dreaming Emmett, is about the murder by white men of black teenager\u00a0Emmett Till\u00a0in 1955. It was performed in 1986 at the State University of New York at Albany, where she was teaching at the time.\u00a0Morrison was also a visiting professor at\u00a0Bard College\u00a0from 1986 to 1988.<\/p>\n The Beloved Trilogy and the Nobel Prize: 1987\u20131998<\/strong><\/p>\n In 1987, Morrison published her most celebrated novel,\u00a0Beloved. It was inspired by the true story of an enslaved African-American woman,\u00a0Margaret Garner,\u00a0a piece of history that Morrison had discovered when compiling\u00a0The Black Book<\/em>. Garner had escaped slavery but was pursued by slave hunters. Facing a return to slavery, Garner killed her two-year-old daughter but was captured before she could kill herself.\u00a0Morrison’s novel imagines the dead baby returning as a ghost, Beloved, to haunt her mother and family.<\/p>\n Beloved<\/em>\u00a0was a critical success, and a bestseller for 25 weeks. Despite overall high acclaim,\u00a0Beloved<\/em>\u00a0failed to win the prestigious\u00a0National Book Award\u00a0or the\u00a0National Book Critics Circle Award. Forty-eight black critics and writers,\u00a0among them\u00a0Maya Angelou, protested the omission in a statement that\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0published on January 24, 1988.\u00a0“Despite the international stature of Toni Morrison, she has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve,” they wrote. Two months later,\u00a0Beloved<\/em>\u00a0won the\u00a0Pulitzer Prize for fiction.\u00a0It also won an\u00a0Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.<\/p>\n Beloved<\/em>\u00a0is the first of three novels about love and African-American history, sometimes called the Beloved Trilogy. Morrison said that they are intended to be read together, explaining, “The conceptual connection is the search for the beloved \u2013 the part of the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you.” The second novel in the trilogy,\u00a0Jazz, came out in 1992. Told in language that imitates the rhythms of jazz music, the novel is about a love triangle during the\u00a0Harlem Renaissance\u00a0in New York City. That year she also published her first book of literary criticism,\u00a0Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination<\/em>\u00a0(1992), an examination of the African-American presence in white American literature.<\/p>\n Before the third novel of the trilogy came out, in 1993 Morrison was awarded the\u00a0Nobel Prize in Literature. Her citation reads: Toni Morrison, “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” She was the first black woman of any nationality to win the prize.\u00a0In her Nobel acceptance speech, Morrison talked about the power of storytelling. To make her point, she told a story. She spoke about a blind, old, black woman who is approached by a group of young people. They demand of her, “Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? \u2026 Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story.”<\/p>\n Morrison was also honored with the 1996\u00a0National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which is awarded to a writer “who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work.”<\/p>\n The third of her Beloved trilogy,\u00a0Paradise, about citizens of an all-black town, came out in 1997. The next year, Morrison was on the cover of\u00a0Time\u00a0magazine, only the second female writer of fiction and second black writer of fiction to appear on what was perhaps the most significant U.S. magazine cover of the era.<\/p>\n Beloved<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0onscreen, and “the Oprah effect”<\/strong><\/p>\n Also in 1998, the movie adaptation of Beloved was released, directed by Jonathan Demme and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey, who had spent ten years bringing it to the screen. Winfrey also stars as the main character, Sethe. The movie flopped at the box office. A review in The Economist suggested that “most audiences are not eager to endure nearly three hours of a cerebral film with an original story line featuring supernatural themes, murder, rape and slavery.” Film critic Janet Maslin, however, in her review “No Peace from a Brutal Legacy” called it a “transfixing, deeply felt adaptation of Toni Morrison’s novel. \u2026Its linchpin is of course Oprah Winfrey, who had the clout and foresight to bring ‘Beloved’ to the screen and has the dramatic presence to hold it together.”<\/p>\n Ofrah gave space to Toni’s other creations too in her famous talk show.<\/p>\n On November 17, 2017, Princeton University dedicated Morrison Hall (a building previously called West College) in her honor.<\/p>\n Home<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0and final years: 2010\u20132019<\/strong><\/p>\n Morrison wrote books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison, who was a painter and a musician. Slade died of\u00a0pancreatic cancer.\u00a0On December 22, 2010, aged 45.\u00a0Morrison’s novel\u00a0Home<\/em>\u00a0was half-completed when her son died.<\/p>\n In May 2011, Morrison received an Honorary\u00a0Doctor of Letters\u00a0degree from\u00a0Rutgers University-New Brunswick\u00a0during the commencement ceremony where she delivered a speech of the “pursuit of life, liberty, meaningfulness, integrity, and truth.”<\/p>\n Morrison had stopped working on her latest novel when her son died. She said that afterward, “I stopped writing until I began to think, He would be really put out if he thought that he had caused me to stop. ‘Please, Mom, I’m dead, could you keep going…?<\/p>\n She completed\u00a0Home<\/em>\u00a0and dedicated it to her son Slade Morrison. Published in 2012, it is the story of a\u00a0Korean War\u00a0veteran in the segregated United States of the 1950s, who tries to save his sister from brutal medical experiments at the hands of a white doctor.<\/p>\n In 2012\u00a0Oberlin College\u00a0became the home base of the Toni Morrison Society, an international literary society dedicated to scholarly research of Morrison’s work. God Help the Child, Morrison’s eleventh novel, was published 2015. It follows Bride, an executive in the fashion and beauty industry whose mother tormented her as a child for being dark-skinned\u2013\u2013a childhood trauma that has dogged Bride her whole life.<\/p>\n Morrison was a member of the editorial advisory board member of\u00a0The Nation, a magazine which was started in 1865 by Northern abolitionists.<\/p>\n Documentary films<\/strong><\/p>\n Morrison was the subject of a film entitled\u00a0Imagine \u2013 Toni Morrison Remembers<\/em>, directed by Jill Nichols and shown on\u00a0BBC1\u00a0television on July 15, 2015, in which Morrison talked to\u00a0Alan Yentob\u00a0about her life and work.<\/p>\n In 2016, Oberlin College received a grant to complete a documentary film begun in 2014,\u00a0The Foreigner’s Home<\/em>, about Morrison’s intellectual and artistic vision.<\/p>\n The painful farewell<\/strong><\/p>\n Morrison died at\u00a0Montefiore Medical Center, New York City on August 5, 2019, from complications of\u00a0pneumonia. She was 88 years old. It’ a global loss. Morrison not only unveiled the black agony but also helped raise American multiculturalism to the world stage. The world is mourning her death. A strong lady with a pen which never rested has left. Adieu, the great writer who wrote even in pain and difficult times !<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/thewalkeronline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/Toni-youth.jpg?resize=640%2C519&ssl=1\")
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