Toni Morrison

토니 모리슨(Toni Morrison, 1931년 2월 18일 ~)은 1993년 노벨 문학상을 수상한 미국의 작가이며 에디터이자 교수이다. 그녀의 소설은 서사적인 테마와 생생한 대사, 풍부하게 묘사된 흑인 등장인물들로 유명하다. 그녀의 소설에는 The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved가 있으며, Beloved로 1988년에 소설부문 퓰리처 상을 받았다. 그녀의 작품은 무대에서 공연되고 영화화되고있다.

Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford. She is the second of four children in a working-class family. As a child, Morrison read fervently; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. Morrison's father told her numerous folktales of the black community (a method of storytelling that would later work its way into Morrison's writings).

In 1949 Morrison entered Howard University, where she received a B.A. in English in 1953. She earned a Master of Arts degree in English from Cornell University in 1955, for which she wrote a thesis on suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. After graduation, Morrison became an English instructor at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas (1955–57), then returned to Howard to teach English. She became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

In 1958 she married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect and fellow faculty member at Howard University. They had two children, Harold and Slade, and divorced in 1964. After the divorce she moved to Syracuse, New York, where she worked as a textbook editor. A year and a half later, she went to work as an editor at the New York City headquarters of Random House. As an editor, Morrison played a vital role in bringing black literature into the mainstream, editing books by authors such as Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Gayl Jones.