Toni Morrison

After a four-decade career that has helped change the conversation about race and gender in America, Toni Morrison still has plenty left to say. READ MORE >>

Among the awards received by the 81-year-old writer from Lorain, Ohio, are the 1988 Pulitzer Prize, and, in 1993, she was the first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Moreover, the breathless veneration put forth by her fans—who include Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey—might indicate that Morrison is too mired in the establishment for her novels to provoke or critique. All of these assumptions are dead wrong. The author’s journey through the literary landscape has always been one of defiance. Ever since her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970, when the then 39-year-old Morrison was a single mother living in Queens raising two boys and working as a senior editor at Random House, her fiction has remained both unflinchingly visceral and almost biblical in proportion. Her language can be spare, but every color, description, and emotional or collective massacre has a haunting resonance.