60 Fun Facts About Toni Morrison

What was Toni Morrison's name at birth?

She became a Catholic at 12 and took the baptismal name Anthony, after Anthony of Padua, which was shortened to the nickname Toni.

In which Ohio town was Morrison born and raised?

The town west of Cleveland is also the setting of her debut novel, and since 2019 it has marked her birthday, February 18, as Toni Morrison Day.

Her nickname 'Toni' came from the baptismal name she took when she became a Catholic at 12. What was it?

She chose it after Anthony of Padua; at Lorain High School she was on the debate team, the yearbook staff and in the drama club.

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

The family responded to what she called this 'bizarre form of evil' by laughing at the landlord rather than falling into despair.

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

Her parents also passed on a sense of heritage through African-American folktales, ghost stories and songs.

Morrison's father worked odd jobs and as a welder for which company?

George Wofford had left Georgia after witnessing the lynching of two Black businessmen on his street, hoping to find work in Ohio's industrial economy.

From which university did Morrison graduate in 1953 with a B.A. in English?

She had first enrolled in the drama program there in 1949, and toured the Deep South with the university's theatre troupe, the Howard Players.

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

She wrote it at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, before teaching English at Texas Southern University in Houston.

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

She lodged near Calvary Baptist Church in Ithaca during her first year, and later returned as an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large from 1997 to 2003.

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

They had two sons before divorcing in 1964; she kept his surname and became known as Toni Morrison.

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

She began at its textbook division L. W. Singer in Syracuse in 1965 and transferred to New York City two years later.

Morrison edited the 1975 autobiography The Greatest: My Own Story by which sports figure?

As an editor she also championed Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, Huey Newton, Gayl Jones and the murdered poet Henry Dumas.

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

Random House had been unsure about the project, but the Cleveland Plain Dealer predicted it would 'go like hotcakes'; it was while compiling it that she found the Margaret Garner story.

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

It grew from a short story she brought to a writers' group at Howard about a Black girl who longed to have blue eyes; she wrote it getting up at 4 am while raising two children alone.

How old was Morrison when her first novel was published?

The book sold poorly at first until the City University of New York put it on the reading list for its new Black studies department.

Which Knopf editor went on to edit all but one of Toni Morrison's novels?

John Leonard's favorable New York Times review had called the debut 'history, sociology, folklore, nightmare and music'.

Morrison's debut is narrated mostly by which daughter of Pecola's foster parents?

Nine-year-old Claudia and her sister Frieda take Pecola in after her father burns down the family home; the chapter titles are fragments of the Dick and Jane primer.

In Morrison's debut, what does Pecola Breedlove wish for in an attempt to be beautiful?

She equates the trait with whiteness, and turns at last to a fake spiritual healer called Soaphead Church to grant the wish.

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

Barbara Smith's 1977 essay 'Toward a Black Feminist Criticism' argued that it posed lesbian and feminist questions about Black women's autonomy.

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

It was a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, the first novel by a Black writer so chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940, and it won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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

One of his father's employees witnessed it; the novel opens with an insurance agent named Robert Smith jumping off a roof while trying to fly.

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

She keeps a heavy bag hanging from her ceiling that Milkman and his friend Guitar steal, believing it holds gold; it holds human bones.

In which 1981 novel does the fashion model Jadine fall in love with a penniless drifter named Son?

It was the first of her novels to be given a contemporary setting.

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

It was at that boathouse in Nyack, New York, that she said she 'saw' the image of a woman walking out of the water in a nice hat, the seed of Beloved's title character.

Morrison's first play, produced in 1986, concerns the 1955 murder of which Black teenager?

Commissioned by the New York State Writers Institute at Albany, it was produced in 1986 by Capital Repertory Theatre and directed by Gilbert Moses.

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

Morrison found her story in an 1856 newspaper article while compiling The Black Book; Garner had fled Kentucky to Cincinnati with her family in January 1856.

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

The novel opens there in 1873 with Sethe and her 18-year-old daughter Denver, whose brothers Howard and Buglar had already fled the ghost.

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

Paul D's arrival from the plantation drives out the spirit haunting the house, shortly before a young woman calling herself Beloved appears.

Beloved's dedication reads 'Sixty Million and more'. To whom does it refer?

The epigraph comes from Romans 9:25: 'I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.'

For how many weeks was Beloved a bestseller after its 1987 publication?

Margaret Atwood wrote in The New York Times that the novel would put to rest any doubts about Morrison's stature as a pre-eminent American novelist.

How many Black writers signed the January 1988 New York Times statement protesting that Beloved had won no major award?

Maya Angelou was among them, and two months later the novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Which award did Beloved win in 1988?

It also won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; the conservative critic Stanley Crouch had panned it as 'a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries'.

Beloved was the first of a trilogy. Which 1992 novel, imitating the rhythms of a musical genre, came second?

It concerns a love triangle during the Harlem Renaissance in New York City; Morrison said the three books share 'the search for the beloved'.

Which 1997 novel about the citizens of an all-Black town completed the trilogy that began with Beloved?

The following year Morrison appeared on the cover of Time, only the second female fiction writer and second Black fiction writer to do so.

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

It grew from her 1990 Massey lectures at Harvard and examines the 'Africanist presence' in Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Cather and Hemingway.

In which year was Morrison awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature?

She was the first Black woman of any nationality to win it, cited for novels 'characterized by visionary force and poetic import'.

Which line comes from Morrison's Nobel acceptance speech?

Her Nobel lecture told the story of a blind old Black woman challenged by young people to 'make up a story'.

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 the 1998 film adaptation of Beloved?

Oprah Winfrey, who spent ten years bringing it to the screen, co-produced it and starred as Sethe; it flopped at the box office.

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

Thandiwe Newton played the title role opposite Oprah Winfrey's Sethe.

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

Winfrey picked four of Morrison's novels in six years, a bigger sales boost than the Nobel Prize had given her; Morrison called the club a 'reading revolution'.

How many of Morrison's novels did Oprah Winfrey select for her book club in total?

The first, in 1996, was the story of Milkman Dead; Winfrey said there would have been no Oprah's Book Club without Morrison.

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

It premiered at the Detroit Opera House on May 7, 2005, with Denyce Graves in the title role.

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

Diane Johnson in Vanity Fair called it 'a poetic, visionary, mesmerizing tale' of Indians, Africans, Dutch, Portuguese and English competing in the New World.

Which endowed professorship did Morrison hold at Princeton from 1989 to 2006?

She created the Princeton Atelier, pairing students with visiting artists, and in 2017 the university renamed West College as Morrison Hall.

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

She was the second guest in its 'Grand Invité' program, and later led a Princeton seminar of the same name.

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

He tries to rescue his sister from a white doctor's medical experiments; Morrison dedicated the book to her son Slade, who died while she was writing it.

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

He was 45; Morrison stopped writing for months, then imagined him saying 'Please, Mom, I'm dead, could you keep going?'

Toni Morrison's 2011 play Desdemona reworks which Shakespeare tragedy?

It focuses on Desdemona's relationship with her African nursemaid Barbary, mentioned only briefly by Shakespeare, and premiered in Vienna.

Bride, the dark-skinned beauty executive tormented by her mother, is the protagonist of which 2015 novel?

It was Morrison's eleventh and final novel; an excerpt titled 'Sweetness' appeared in The New Yorker.

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

She later said she had meant that he was being treated 'like a black on the street, already guilty', and in 2008 she endorsed Barack Obama.

Which president presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012?

She said that at Obama's inauguration she 'felt very powerfully patriotic' and like an American for the first time.

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

She argued that white voters had elected Trump out of fear of losing the privileges of their race.

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

She died at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx; her memorial was held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, with Oprah Winfrey and Ta-Nehisi Coates among the eulogists.

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'?

Smith had written in 2019 that Morrison 'rejected the very concept of the narrow door and claimed for herself the wide world'.

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

The international literary society had been founded in 1993, the year of her Nobel Prize.

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

The book won a Coretta Scott King Award; the ruling had declared racially segregated public schools unconstitutional.

In 1998 Morrison became only the second female fiction writer to appear on the cover of which magazine?

The same year brought the film of Beloved; in 2019 the magazine chose her as its woman of the year for 1993 in a retrospective series of covers.

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

They worked together again on Four Songs, premiered at Carnegie Hall by Sylvia McNair in 1994.