Novelist of our hearts Toni Morrison died Monday night, her publisher reports, at the age of 88. Morrison won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her best-selling, groundbreaking novel Beloved, and was the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1993. She wrote 11 novels as well as children’s books and essay collections, and, as editor at Random House, was responsible for publishing a new wave of writing by black authors, including work by Angela Davis, Gayl Jones, and Toni Cade Bambara. Most recently, she was the subject of Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, a literary documentary about her’s life and career. The film’s director, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, said of Morrison, “She ‘cracked the ivory tower’ of the publishing world and did all of this while she was writing her own incredible novels, teaching college, and raising two boys as a single mother.” She also had the dubious honor of being named one of our Octogenarian Hotties back in 2016.
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