58 Fun Facts About Toni Morrison

What was Toni Morrison's name at birth?

Chloe Ardelia Wofford later said she regretted having called herself Toni Morrison when she published her first novel.

In which Ohio town was Morrison born and raised?

Lorain was integrated enough, she said, that she had no strong awareness of segregation until she left it.

Toni Morrison's nickname came from which saint's name she took at her Catholic baptism at 12?

Anthony honored St. Anthony of Padua, and in college she began going by Toni, apparently because people kept stumbling over her first name.

What did Morrison's family's landlord do when her parents couldn't pay the rent?

The landlord set fire to their house with the family inside when she was about two, yet the family refused to be cowed.

Which two authors were among Morrison's favorites as a child?

Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy were among the authors she loved as a girl, and she credited her parents with nurturing that love of reading.

What was Toni Morrison's father's main trade?

A welder by trade, her father once put his initials on a perfect seam he had welded, where no one would ever see them, she recalled.

From which university did Morrison graduate in 1953 with a bachelor's degree in English?

Howard is where she joined the university's theatre troupe, the Howard Players, and toured the segregated South with it.

Morrison's 1955 master's thesis compared the treatment of 'the alienated' by which two writers?

Woolf and Faulkner were the subjects of her thesis, and while teaching English afterward she met and married the architect Harold Morrison.

Where did Morrison earn her Master of Arts degree in 1955?

Cornell University awarded her the master's in 1955, and among the students she later taught was the civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael.

Harold Morrison, whom she married in 1958, was an architect from which country?

Jamaica was Harold Morrison's birthplace, and after their 1964 divorce she kept his surname.

At which publisher did Morrison become the first Black woman senior editor in the fiction department?

Random House kept her as an editor until 1983, when she resigned to concentrate on her own writing.

Which sports star's 1975 autobiography did Toni Morrison publish as an editor?

Muhammad Ali's book was part of her drive, as she put it, to help develop 'a canon of Black work' where Black people talk to Black people.

Which 1974 anthology of photographs and documents of African-American life did Morrison edit?

The Black Book is where she came across the true story of an escaped enslaved mother that inspired her novel Beloved.

What was the title of Morrison's first novel, published in 1970?

The Bluest Eye began as a short story she wrote for a writers' group whose one rule was that members bring something to read.

Which famed Knopf editor became Toni Morrison's editor?

Robert Gottlieb, who had edited Joseph Heller's Catch-22, left Knopf in 1987 to succeed William Shawn as editor of The New Yorker.

Which daughter of Pecola's temporary foster parents narrates much of Morrison's debut novel?

Claudia MacTeer is a fighter: given a white doll she does not want, she takes it apart and destroys it.

In Morrison's second novel, grandmother Eva Peace is suggested to have given up her leg for what?

Insurance money, the novel suggests, is what Eva got for her lost leg, so she could raise her three children after her husband left.

What is Morrison's second novel, about a friendship between two Black women, called?

Sula Peace comes home after ten years away and the town brands her evil, yet its shared hatred of her makes neighbors treat one another better.

Which Morrison novel follows Macon 'Milkman' Dead III from birth to adulthood?

Song of Solomon takes its title from a children's song Milkman hears down South about an enslaved ancestor who flew home to Africa.

How did Macon Dead III get the nickname 'Milkman'?

He was breastfed long past babyhood, and once a man who saw it spread the word, the nickname stuck around town.

In Morrison's third novel, what is the name of Milkman's aunt, a bootlegger and conjure woman?

Pilate keeps a green sack hanging from her ceiling that Milkman and Guitar steal, believing it holds gold, but it holds human bones.

In which 1981 Morrison novel does fashion model Jadine become involved with a penniless drifter named Son?

Tar Baby is set on a Caribbean island, where Son washes up at the estate of a wealthy white family.

After leaving publishing in 1983, Morrison lived in a converted boathouse on which river?

The Hudson flowed past the converted boathouse where she lived after quitting publishing to devote more time to her writing.

Toni Morrison's first play, staged in 1986, dramatized the murder of which civil rights-era victim?

Emmett Till, 14, was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, and his mother's open-casket funeral, attended by tens of thousands, galvanized the civil rights movement.

Beloved was inspired by which enslaved woman, who killed her daughter rather than see her re-enslaved?

Margaret Garner escaped with her family from Kentucky across the Ohio River into Cincinnati in 1856.

At what address in Cincinnati is the haunted house in Beloved?

124 Bluestone Road is haunted by what Sethe believes is her dead daughter's ghost, and she blames it for driving her two sons away.

What is the Kentucky plantation where Sethe and Paul D were enslaved in Beloved called?

Sweet Home turned crueler when a vicious manager called schoolteacher took charge, so the enslaved people there planned to run.

To whom does Beloved's dedication, 'Sixty Million and more', refer?

Africans killed by the Atlantic slave trade are its dedicatees; she later said there was no 'small bench by the road' to remember the enslaved, so her society began placing benches.

Which famous author signed the 1988 statement by 48 Black writers protesting Beloved's lack of awards?

Maya Angelou signed it, but Ralph Ellison did not, saying Morrison didn't need that kind of support, even though it was well intentioned.

Which award did Beloved win in 1988?

The Pulitzer Prize came about two months after 48 Black writers publicly protested that she had never won it or the National Book Award.

Which 1992 novel about a love triangle came second in Morrison's trilogy that began with Beloved?

Jazz turns on Joe Trace, a door-to-door cosmetics salesman in 1920s Harlem who shoots his teenage lover, Dorcas, at a party.

Which novel about the citizens of an all-Black town completed the trilogy that began with Beloved?

Paradise opens with the men of Ruby, an all-Black Oklahoma town, descending with guns on a former convent where a group of women live.

What is the title of Toni Morrison's 1992 criticism subtitled 'Whiteness and the Literary Imagination'?

Playing in the Dark grew from her 1990 Massey Lectures at Harvard and argues that a Black presence shapes classic white American fiction, from Poe to Hemingway.

In 1993, Toni Morrison became the first Black woman to win which prize?

The Nobel Prize address she gave told of young people who demand that a blind old woman make up a story for them.

Which phrase is from Toni Morrison's 1993 address about a blind old woman?

We do language, she said, and that 'may be the measure of our lives'; word-work is sublime, she argued, because it makes meaning that secures our human difference.

Which honor did the National Endowment for the Humanities give Morrison in 1996?

It is the federal government's highest honor in the humanities; her lecture, 'The Future of Time', opened with the aphorism 'Time, it seems, has no future.'

Who directed Beloved, the 1998 film of Morrison's novel starring Oprah Winfrey?

Jonathan Demme's Beloved cost about $80 million but earned under $23 million in North America, a flop for co-producer Oprah Winfrey.

Who played Sethe's lover Paul D in the 1998 film of Beloved?

Danny Glover played Paul D, whose arrival at Sethe's house drives out an angry ghost, just before a young woman named Beloved appears.

When Oprah picked Morrison's debut novel for her book club in 2000, roughly how many extra paperbacks did it sell?

800,000 paperbacks sold, and Oprah Winfrey told Morrison there would never have been a book club without her as an author.

In Morrison's 1992 novel, what does Violet do at her husband's young lover's funeral?

She attacks the corpse with a knife, which earns Violet the nickname 'Violent'.

Which composer wrote the 2005 opera about the woman who inspired Beloved, with Morrison's libretto?

Richard Danielpour's opera draws on a real case in which abolitionists wanted the mother tried for murder, yet she was sent back into slavery as property.

Morrison's 2008 novel A Mercy is set in which colony in 1682?

Virginia 'was still a mess' in 1682, the novel says, and its title's mercy is a mother's plea that a visiting trader take her daughter, Florens, to settle a debt.

At which university did Toni Morrison hold a chair from 1989 until she retired in 2006?

Princeton University is where she founded the Princeton Atelier, a program that brings writers and performing artists to work with students.

In 2006 Morrison guest-curated a month of events at which museum on the theme 'The Foreigner's Home'?

The Louvre program later became the subject of a documentary that borrowed its title, The Foreigner's Home.

Morrison's 2012 novel Home follows a veteran of which war through the segregated 1950s?

Korean War veteran Frank Money crosses segregated America to rescue his sister from a white doctor's medical experiments.

Morrison's younger son Slade, with whom she wrote children's books, died in 2010 of what?

Pancreatic cancer killed Slade at 45, and she could not work for months before finishing Home, which she dedicated to him.

Toni Morrison's 2011 play reimagines Barbary, a maid mentioned only briefly in which Shakespeare tragedy?

Othello's Desdemona recalls her mother's maid Barbary, who died singing a willow song, and Morrison's play imagines Barbary as an African woman.

In Morrison's God Help the Child, why does young Lula Ann testify against a teacher accused of abuse?

To win her mother's approval, she lied, and the innocent teacher went to prison.

Which president did Morrison famously describe in 1998 as 'our first black President'?

Bill Clinton, she wrote, displayed 'almost every trope of blackness', from a single-parent household to saxophone playing, and was being hunted like a guilty 'perp'.

Which president presented Toni Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom?

Barack Obama gave her the medal in 2012; at his inauguration, she said, she had felt very powerfully patriotic and truly American.

What was the title of Morrison's November 2016 New Yorker essay on Trump's election?

Mourning for Whiteness ran online as 'Making America White Again' and argued that white voters' choices showed their fear of losing status.

Morrison died in August 2019 at the age of 88 from complications of what?

Pneumonia complications killed her at 88, and later that year her Ohio hometown voted to mark her birthday as Toni Morrison Day.

Which 2019 documentary about Morrison, directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, premiered at Sundance?

Angela Davis, Oprah Winfrey, Fran Lebowitz, Sonia Sanchez and Walter Mosley all appear in it.

Which writer introduced the 2022 standalone edition of Toni Morrison's 'Recitatif'?

Zadie Smith introduced the story Morrison called an experiment in removing racial codes: it never says which of its two girls is Black and which is white.

Which college became the home base of the Toni Morrison Society in 2012?

Oberlin College became home to a society that places memorial benches at sites of Black history, after Morrison said in 1989 there was 'no small bench by the road'.

Morrison's 2004 children's book Remember marked the 50th anniversary of which Supreme Court decision?

Brown v. Board of Education turned 50 in 2004, and Morrison paired archival photos of school integration with imagined thoughts of the children in them.

Which writer, who died in 1987, did Morrison eulogise in The New York Times?

James Baldwin was her literary inspiration, and her eulogy thanked him for three gifts, among them his courage and his tenderness.

Which composer worked with Morrison on the 1992 song cycle Honey and Rue?

André Previn wrote the cycle for soprano Kathleen Battle, and he later conducted her recording of it himself.