Toni Morrison, Seminal Author Who Stirringly Chronicled the Black American Experience, Dies at 88

“I’ve spent my entire life trying to make sure the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books,” she said in the 2019 documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am.The Bluest Eye was published in 1970 to a minimal response, although the New York Times reviewed it positively, calling her a “writer of considerable power and tenderness.” To earn a living for herself and her two children, Morrison worked as an editor at Random House, encouraging black writers like Gayl Jones and Angela Davis to embrace their own unique and culturally-specific voices. Morrison stole enough writing time to be able to publish two more novels in the ‘70s: Sula (1973), which traced a black Ohio neighborhood through the eyes of two best friends; and Song of Solomon (1977), a decades-long epic chronicling the life of a black man. After its snubbing at the National Book Awards ensued a heated controversy, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.“I felt I represented a whole world of women who either were silenced or who never had received the imprimatur of the established literary world,” Morrison told The New York Times Magazine in 1994.While Morrison became revered, she also became feared —for her works’ graphic violence or sexually explicit content. She eventually regrouped and published the novel the same month she received her Medal of Freedom, telling the Telegraph that year that she realized “the last thing my son would want was for me to be very self-involved and narcissistic and self-stroking.” Morrison remained active in public life through the 2010s, commenting on political issues, giving interviews, and writing constantly.“The writing is — I’m free from pain,” she told NPR’s Fresh Air in 2015.