Nobel laureate, Toni Morrison, dead but these 11 facts about her will amaze you

Celebrated American author and Nobel laureate, Toni Morrison, the author of acclaimed novels such as “Beloved” and “Song of Solomon,” is no more, according to reports.

The death of the 88-year old seminal author who was also won a Pulitzer Prize, and was a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom died Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, after a brief illness.

Moments after her death, Morrison’s family issued a statement which partly read thus; “It is with profound sadness we share that, following a short illness, our adored mother and grandmother, Toni Morrison, passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends.

As a parting shot, RIPPLES NIGERIA chronicles 11 facts you may not know about the late author who was one of the most iconic writers of her time.

(1.) Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford. She was the second of four children in a working-class, African-American family.

(2.) In 1949, she enrolled at the historically black Howard University, seeking the company of fellow black intellectuals and graduated in 1953 with a B.A. in English and went on to earn a Master of Arts from Cornell University in 1955.

(3.) She later taught English, first at Texas Southern University in Houston for two years, then at Howard for seven years and 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.

(4) 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.

(5) 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.

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(6) One of the first books she worked on was the groundbreaking Contemporary African Literature (1972), a collection that included work by Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe and South African playwright Athol Fugard.

(7) She fostered a new generation of African-American authors, including Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Gayl Jones, whose writing Morrison discovered, and she brought out the autobiography of boxer Muhammad Ali, The Greatest. She also published and publicized the work of Henry Dumas, a little-known novelist and poet who was shot dead by a transit officer in the New York City subway in 1968.

(8) In 1987, Morrison published her most celebrated novel, Beloved. It was inspired by the true story of an enslaved African-American woman, Margaret Garner, a piece of history that Morrison had discovered when compiling The Black Book.

(9) In the year 1993, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for her trilogy titled Beloved becoming the first black woman of any nationality to win the prize.

(10) In 1996 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government’s highest honor for “distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities for her exceptional writing career.

(11) Morrison was also honored with the 1996 National 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.”

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