Toni Morrison is among the few American Nobel Laureates for Literature. She won that prize in nineteen ninety-three. She was the first African American to receive the award. The Nobel Committee said the imaginative force and poetic voice of her writing gave life to an important part of American reality.

The writer was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in nineteen thirty-one in Lorain, Ohio. She took the nickname Toni in college.

Toni Morrison started reading early in life and says it was always a huge pleasure. In nineteen forty-nine, she entered Howard University in Washington, D.C. She studied English literature. She later received a master’s degree in the same subject from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. After college she married Harold Morrison and had two children. Their marriage ended in nineteen sixty-four.

Morrison became an English professor and said she found teaching very satisfying. She once told a reporter that she loved nothing more than to discuss books with students who are new to them. But she said she realized that she needed to write when she discovered there was a book she wanted to read that had not yet been written.

American novelist Toni Morrison smiles after being awarded the Legion of Honor in Paris in November of last year

That book turned out to be “The Bluest Eye,” published in nineteen seventy. Toni Morrison wrote about a little black girl who believes she would be beautiful, loved and happy if she only had the blue eyes of a white girl.