Toni Morrison has passed away at the age of 88. A source at the famous author’s publisher Knopf reportedly said she passed away Monday night, but the cause of death is not yet known.
According to decider.com, she is best known for Beloved, a 1987 novel about an African-American slave who escaped to Ohio after the Civil War and which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, throughout her lengthy career, Morrison published dozens of books about the black experience in America, including Beloved, Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1997), three novels that form a loose trilogy.
Toni Morrison was an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher and professor emeritus at Princeton University.
Beloved was later adapted into a film of the same title with Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover, their performances helped make the book popular.
In 1988, she was awarded the Pulitzer and the American Book Award for Beloved, and five years later, in 1993, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first black woman to ever receive the honour.
In 1998, director Jonathan Demme adapted Beloved for the big screen alongside Winfrey, who starred and served as an executive producer. Winfrey plays Sethe, a former slave who moves in with an old friend from her plantation, Paul D (Glover). Shortly after, Sethe is visited by the spirit of a young woman, Beloved (Thandie Newton), who she learns is her reincarnated daughter.
The film went on to win an Oscar for Best Costume Design, while helping to popularise Morrison’s work to Oprah’s larger audience, and later, the world as a whole.
According to decieder.com, Morrison’s final novel was God Help the Child (2015), about a dark-skinned child who is abused by her light-skinned parents. After the novel was published, in 2016, she was awarded the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, one of the highest honours in American literature.