Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931, the daughter of a welder and a homemaker who encouraged her to read literature and taught her folktales and spirituals at home. After graduating from Howard University, she taught English literature, eventually becoming an editor at Random House, where she fostered and promoted a generation of black writers. The Bluest Eye<\/em> grew out of a short story she\u2019d written in high school about a young African American girl who dislikes her own appearance and yearns for blue eyes, which she associates with whiteness and with beauty. Morrison wrote the book, she said in an interview in 2014<\/a>, \u201cbecause I wanted to read it. I thought that kind of book, with that subject\u2014those most vulnerable, most undescribed, not taken seriously little black girls\u2014had never existed seriously in literature. No one had ever written about them except as props. Since I couldn\u2019t find a book that did that, I thought, \u2018Well, I\u2019ll write it and then I\u2019ll read it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Although The Bluest Eye<\/em> received little critical attention and mainstream success at the time, it helped introduce Morrison<\/a> to Bob Bernstein, the then-president of Random House, and to Robert Gottlieb, the editor of novels including Catch-22 <\/em>and True Grit<\/em>, who became one of Morrison\u2019s closest collaborators. Morrison\u2019s second novel, Sula<\/em>, was nominated for the National Book Award; her third, 1977\u2019s Song of Solomon<\/em>, brought her international acclaim for its epic portrayal of heritage and the sweep of history over one Michigan family. \u201cFew Americans know, and can say, more than [Morrison] has,\u201d a Times<\/em> critic wrote<\/a>. Success, Morrison told The Washington Post<\/em><\/a> that year, often felt like \u201cit was happening to a friend of mine that I like a lot.\u201d She described taking her son to a piano lesson and happening across a large display of her work in a bookstore window. \u201cThere was this huge sign in the window which said \u2018A Triumph\u2019 by Toni Morrison. I was by myself in the car. And I realized that was me they were talking about.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n The 1987 publication of Beloved<\/em> cemented Morrison\u2019s reputation as one of the most important writers in American history. The book emerged from an intermingled feeling of contentment and anxiety, she told Interview<\/em><\/a> in 2012. She was sitting on her porch overlooking the Hudson River, having recently quit editing to focus on writing full-time. \u201cI was really happy,\u201d Morrison said. \u201cWhich is to say, I guess I hadn\u2019t been. I hadn\u2019t felt that\u2014it must have been a combination of happiness and something else. And it was then that I wrote Beloved<\/em>. It was all like a flood when I wrote that book.\u201d Inspired by the story of a real woman who escaped slavery, Margaret Garner, the novel weaves together a profound tale about the brutal, intergenerational legacy of trauma.<\/p>\n Before Beloved<\/em> won the Pulitzer, a group of 48 black writers and scholars wrote an open letter<\/a> to The New York Times<\/em> praising Morrison\u2019s work and its significance to the American canon:<\/p>\n The legitimate need for our own critical voice in relation to our own literature can no longer be denied. We, therefore, urgently affirm our rightful and positive authority in the realm of American letters and, in this prideful context, we do raise this tribute to the author of The Bluest Eye<\/em>, Sula<\/em>, Song of Solomon<\/em>, Tar Baby<\/em>, and Beloved<\/em>.<\/p>\n Alive, we write this testament of thanks to you, dear Toni: alive, beloved and persevering, magical. Among the fecund intimacies of our hidden past, and among the coming days of dream or nightmares that will follow from the bidden knowledge of our conscious heart, we find your life work ever building to a monument of vision and discovery and trust. You have never turned away the searching eye, the listening ear attuned to horror or to histories providing for our faith. And freely you have given to us every word that you have found important to the forward movement of our literature, our life. For all of America, for all of American letters, you have advanced the moral and artistic standards by which we must measure the daring and the love of our national imagination and our collective intelligence as a people.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In 2000, Morrison was awarded the National Medal for Humanities, and in 2012 she was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. Morrison\u2019s prose, President Barack Obama said,<\/a>\u201cbrings us that kind of moral and emotional intensity that few writers ever attempt.\u201d In the meantime, she continued to teach throughout her career. In 1989 Morrison was appointed the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, where she stayed until her retirement in 2006. In addition to her writing, Morrison\u2019s legacy as a professor and a mentor is one of her crowning gifts to a nation that mourns her.<\/p>\n \u201cWord-work is sublime,\u201d Morrison said in her Nobel lecture in 1993<\/a>, \u201cbecause it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference\u2014the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n SOPHIE GILBERT<\/a> is a staff writer at The Atlantic, <\/em>where she covers culture.<\/p>\n\n