It’s the birthday of American literary giant Toni Morrison, born Chloe Wofford. Morrison was born in 1931 to Ramah and George Wofford in Lorain, OH, a town with a diverse immigrant population. People of different ethnicities mixed and went to school together, and Morrison didn’t personally encounter segregation until she was a student at Howard University in Washington, D.C. She found segregation “too stupid” to take seriously.

After graduating from Howard in 1953 with a degree in English, Morrison earned a master’s at Cornell. She then taught at Texas Southern University but returned to teach at Howard for seven years, where she met, married, and divorced Harold Morrison, with whom she had two sons. After the marriage ended, she began working as an editor for the textbook division of Random House in Syracuse, NY, moving after two years to New York City to work in fiction for the same publisher. As the first black female senior editor in that department, Morrison did a great deal to bring black literature to the forefront, publishing the likes of Gayl Jones, Angela Davis, and Henry Dumas, a poet and novelist who Morrison called a genius and who was shot at the age of 33 by NCY Transit police.

In 1970, Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published, followed by Sula in 1975 and Song of Solomon in 1977. This last won the National Book Critics Circle Award and made Morrison’s reputation nationally. Tar Baby came out in 1981 and two years later Morrison left publishing to focus more on writing. In 1987, she published her masterpiece, Beloved. Inspired by a true story, Beloved is about a woman, Sethe, who escapes slavery but is hunted down and tries to kill her own children rather than see them recaptured. She only succeeds in killing one daughter, who then haunts Sethe and her family and years later shows up in person, or so Sethe believes. Beloved won the Pulitzer and the acclaim of critics like Michiko Kakutani and Margaret Atwood. In 1993, Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first black woman of any nationality to do so.

Morrison taught at Princeton from 1989 until 2006, where she told creative writing students *not* to follow the advice to write what they know, because they didn’t know anything and because “I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends.” She encouraged them instead to invent something outside their own existence.

Morrison’s other novels include Jazz (1992), Paradise (1997), Love (2003), A Mercy (2008), Home (2012), and God Help the Child (2015). This last has been likened to a brutal modern-day fairy tale and explores how abuse in childhood shapes the adult; if I can get up my courage, I’ll read it. Twenty life points to anyone who already has.

It’s also the birthday of another great American author, Wallace Stegner (1909 – 1993). We’ll see you next year, Wallace.

Happy Sunday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.