Toni Morrison, Nobel laureate who transfigured American literature, dies at 88

They tussled, however, over whether Ms. Morrison was best described as an African American writer, an African American female writer or simply an American writer — and whether the label mattered at all.“I can accept the labels,” Ms. Morrison told the New Yorker in 2003, “because being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. She said that, as an editor, she avoided the simultaneous release of books by multiple black authors so that reviewers, who seemed to regard works by African Americans as all of a piece, would not be enticed to dump them into a single review.Later, as an author, she encountered some of the same prejudices.“I was reading some essay about the ‘Black Family,’ ” she once recalled, “and the writer went into a comparison between one of my novels and ‘The Cosby Show.’ ” The analogy, she told Time magazine, was “like comparing apples and Buicks.”Ms. Morrison rewrote her old short story as the novel “The Bluest Eye” in part, she said, to counter the prevailing credo of the time, “Black is beautiful.”“When people said at that time black is beautiful — yeah? In that work and others, Ms. Morrison said she tried to capture black sisterhood.It was “so critical among black women because there wasn’t anybody else,” she once told the publication Poets and Writers. “I spent a long time trying to figure out what it was about slavery that made it so repugnant, so personal, so indifferent, so intimate, and yet so public.”The intensity of her books at times attracted criticism, and no work more than “Beloved.” Stanley Crouch, the cultural critic, called the work a “blackface holocaust novel.” He described Ms. Morrison as “immensely talented” but remarked, according to Time magazine, that she would benefit from “a new subject matter, the world she lives in, not this world of endless black victims.”Outside such criticism, however, “Beloved” was praised as one of the most significant works of the century.“If she wrote only ‘Beloved,’ that would have been enough,” said Mitchell, of Georgetown, “because in that she is able to take her readers to a moment in American history that is unthinkable.”In 1988, 48 black writers — among them Maya Angelou, Alice Walker and Ernest J. That year, the Pulitzer went to “Beloved.”Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard University historian, remarked that she won the Nobel primarily for “Beloved” and her novel “Jazz” (1992), set in Harlem in the 1920s, whose voice he described as “combining Ellington, Faulkner and Maria Callas.”Ms. Morrison’s later novels included “Paradise” (1997), set in an all-black town in the Western United States; “Love” (2003), about the many lives affected by a deceased hotel owner; “A Mercy” (2008), an exploration of early American slavery; “Home” (2012), a portrait of a returning Korean War veteran; and “God Help the Child” (2015), the story of a black woman rejected because of the darkness of her skin, and the far-reaching effects of childhood pain.Other works by Ms. Morrison included a play, “Dreaming Emmett,” written in the 1980s about the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till.