Toni Morrison, was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931, in Lorain Ohio. The second of four children she grew up in a working class family where she was exposed to folktales of the African American community.
Morrison was also well read and excelled at school. In 1949, Toni as she was now called, entered Howard University and obtained her B.A. in English. She then attended Cornell and earned her Master’s before moving to Texas Southern University in Houston to become an English instructor.
In 1958, she married Harold Morrison and had two children before divorcing and moving to Syracuse New York to work as a book editor. She soon moved to New York City to become an editor for Random House publishers. There, she worked to bring the work of African American writers to a wider audience.
Morrison began writing in the 1960s and published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970.  That novel was followed by Sula, which saw her nominated for a National Book Award. But her third novel was a breakthrough. Song of Soloman, published in 1977 was a major best seller and won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award.
Central to Morrison’s work is America's history of racism and slavery although the subjects of her novels grapple with the central issues all people face.
Fans of Morrison had to wait nine years for her next work—Beloved. The book was a major success. Initially, the book did garner the major awards which provoked an outcry. Finally, the novel won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The stature of the novel has continued to grow and in 2006 The New York Times Book Review called Beloved the title Best American Novel of the Previous 25 years.
Morrison continued to teach English at two branches of the State University of New York and then held positions at Rutgers and Yale until 1989 when Morrison became Humanities Chair at Princeton University.
In 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African American woman to win the award.
Morrison followed up Beloved with the novel Jazz, published in 1992 and Paradise in 1999. She continues to lecture and write.

Beloved

Part history lesson, part ghost story, Beloved explores the evils and hardships of slavery and is often heart wrenching but it also is rich in humanity, humour and compassion. Beloved explores ideas of repression, motherhood and fatherhood.
At the center of Morrison's fifth novel, is an unspeakable act of horror and heroism: the novels central character Sethe a woman brutally kills her own infant daughter rather than allow her to be sold into slavery. The novel, set in the years following the American Civil War follows her journey from slavery to freedom.
At the novel’s onset Sethe she is living in Ohio with her daughter, Denver, and the ghost of the daughter Sethe killed. When an old friend and fellow slave from Kentucky, Paul, turns up at her doorstep, Sethe finally gives herself up to long repressed physical affection. Paul exorcises the ghost from Sethe’s house but soon a woman calling herself Beloved shows up at the house moves herself in and finally rids the house of Paul. Beloved is the name carved into the murdered daughters gravestone and Sethe believes Beloved is the returned ghost.  But there is also evidence she is a woman who has escaped a white man who had abused her and held her locked up in his house. Beloved takes over the house, initially beguiling the mother and daughter and providing much needed company but then bringing up events of the past and driving Sethe slowly to despair. Sethe comes to believe Beloved is intent on revenge and almost dies when Denver and Paul return.
A film version of Beloved, directed by Jonathan Demme was released in 1998 to critical and popular acclaim