Born: February 13, 1931, Lorain, OH

Education: Howard University, B.A., 1953; Cornell University, M.A., 1955

One of the most influential contemporary writers, Morrison is the first African American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993). Instilling family stories, reading at preschool age, she became an excellent student. Graduate school and teaching literature inspired her to pursue writing. She explains: “The search for love and identity runs through most everything I write.”

Her most uncommon characters seek to affirm themselves in communities or overcome barriers. Sula depicts the close friendship of Nel Wright and Sula Peace and life in a midwestern community, The Bottom, between the 1920s and 1940s. The Bluest Eye presents a black girl who prays for blue eyes, believing such would ensure her acceptance by people in a 1940s Ohio town. The main character in Song of Solomon is Milkman Dead, an Ohioan. He goes to the South to learn of his ancestors, whose folklore honored escaped slaves who flew back to Africa. Tar Baby, which uses whites as key actors, portrays race, class, and gender conflict on a Caribbean island. Beloved unveils the ideal and reality of freedom. The slave Sethe escapes with her infant and, to elude capture, kills the child. Thus, though freeing herself, she becomes an outcast among the freedpeople.