Toni Morrison has died.
Morrison was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. She is the author of 11 novels, in addition to children’s books and essay collections. Among them are celebrated works like “Song of Solomon,” which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977. “Beloved,” which netted the Pulitzer Prize in 1988,” was made into a movie in 1998 directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Oprah Winfrey.
The Princeton faculty member picked up the Nobel Prize in 1993, with the Swedish Academy citing her “novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import,” through which she “[gave] life to an essential aspect of American reality.” The New York Times described her writing style as ringing "with the cadence of Black oral tradition."