Toni Morrison was an American writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her novels Beloved, Song of Solomon and others explored the way African-Americans search for freedom and identity in a country obsessed（受困扰的）with skin color. Morrison was nearly 40 when she published her first novel The Bluest Eye in 1970. The Nobel Prize committee described her writing as language itself, a language she wants to liberate from race. Her novels discussed America's past, focusing on black history and the effects of slavery and racism. She called her characters "the unfree at the heart of the democratic (民主的)experiment".
In 1988, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Beloved, the story of a mother who kills her baby daughter rather than permit her to be born into slavery. It became a best-seller and was later made into a film with Oprah Winfrey. Many Americans admired her as the country's greatest living writer, including former President Barack Obama.
She was born in 1931. She attended Howard University, an all-black university in Washington, D. C. At Howard, she read African, British and American literature, including writers William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. After a short marriage, she became a single mother of two sons and worked as a book editor in New York.
Several publishers rejected her first book The Bluest Eye but it impressed The New York Times' book critic John Leonard, who believed Morrison was an important new voice. He said her writing was "so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry".
Morrison enjoyed her literary fame and was proud of her Nobel Prize won in 1993.
