(born 1931) Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988 for Beloved (1987) and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in northern Ohio, the setting for her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), she changed her name to Toni while an undergraduate at Howard University. After briefly teaching college, she began her first novel while a Random House senior editor. Like others that followed—Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved, Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998)—it charted the pains, emotions and intimacies of race and gender. The last three form a loose, historically based trilogy, beginning with slavery and Reconstruction, continuing with African American migration to 1920s New York City, NY, and culminating in the conflicts of an allblack township in Oklahoma in the years after the Second World War.

In 1998 Beloved was adapted for the screen by Oprah Winfrey. Since 1993 Morrison has been a professor of Humanities at Princeton University.