The impact of Toni Morrison’s writing on world literature cannot be understated.
The Ohio-born writer – a “black woman writer,” as she liked to describe herself – passed away on Tuesday at the age of 88, following a brief bout with pneumonia, according to a spokesman.
Morrison, who didn’t publish her first book until she was in her 40s, won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature. She was the first African American to win the prize, with the judges noting her “novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import.”
Her best books – including Beloved, Song of Solomon, and The Bluest Eye – shed light on the black experience in America in stark but beautiful language.
She said she only began writing because she had never read a book that was focused seriously on the joy and pain that comes with growing up as a black girl in America, which led her to pen her first novel “The Bluest Eye.”
South Carolina was an especially important locale for the writer too. Morrison was vital in establishing Freedom Park on Hilton Head Island, which marks the spot of the first self-governing village for freed slaves in 1861.
Over a career that spanned 11 books, Morrison would win nearly every conceivable writing award, and a reputation as perhaps the greatest writer working in the English language of her era.
