Toni Morrison, Literary Icon, Dies At 88 In NYC

NEW YORK — Toni Morrison, the iconic and pathbreaking author known for probing race and African-American identity, died Monday night in New York City. She was 88.

Morrison died at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx after a brief illness, according to her family and her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.

"Toni Morrison passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends," the family said in a statement. "She was an extremely devoted mother, grandmother, and aunt who reveled in being with her family and friends. The consummate writer who treasured the written word, whether her own, her students or others, she read voraciously and was most at home when writing."

Morrison published eleven novels in her five-decade career, some of which became part of the American literary canon even as they sparked controversy in school districts that tried to ban them. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her fifth novel, "Beloved," in 1988 and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993.

In giving her the latter honor, the Swedish Academy called her an author "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."

In addition to her writing, Morrison worked from 1967 to 1983 as the first African-American editor at Random House, where she published authors such as Muhammad Ali and the radical activists Huey P. Newton and Angela Davis.

Morrison also had a long career teaching at colleges in New York and elsewhere including Bard College, SUNY Albany, Yale University, Rutgers University and her alma mater, Howard University.

Writers on Tuesday mourned the death of an American literary titan. The essayist Roxane Gay called Morrison's passing "a devastating loss to the world of words, to our understanding of power and it’s reach, to the cultivation of empathy, to rich, nuanced, elegant storytelling."

"She wasn’t just the queen of American letters. She wrote America’s letters," Ibram X. Kendi, the founding director of American University's Antiracist Research and Policy Center, said on Twitter. "And whether we realize it or not, all Americans and all writers are indebted to Toni Morrison."

Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio on Feb. 18, 1931, Morrison grew up in a working-class black family and graduated from Howard in 1953. After receiving a master's degree from Cornell University in 1955, she started as an editor with the Random House divison L.W. Singer in 1965 and moved to the publisher's fiction department in New York City two years later.

Knopf published Morrison's debut novel, "The Bluest Eye," in 1970. Ten others followed, including the acclaimed "Beloved," inspired by the true story of an enslaved African-American woman who killed her child. Some schools have banned the novel for its violent and sexual content, but it nonetheless became an iconic work of American literature.

"I can think of few writers in American letters who wrote with more humanity or with more love for language than Toni," Knopf Chairman Sonny Mehta said in a statement. "Her narratives and mesmerizing prose have made an indelible mark on our culture. Her novels command and demand our attention. They are canonical works, and more importantly, they are books that remain beloved by readers."

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of novels Morrison published. It was 11, not nine.