Toni Morrison

Chloe Wofford grew up in Lorain, Ohio, in a working-class family that told stories and sang. Her father was a welder who held several jobs at once; her mother cleaned other people's houses when money was tight. She read constantly, went to Howard University, took a master's degree at Cornell and taught before moving into publishing.

By the late 1960s she was divorced, raising two small sons and working as an editor at Random House in New York, where she championed Black writers including Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara and Angela Davis. The only time she had for her own writing was before the children woke. She got up in the dark, made coffee and wrote by hand. The Bluest Eye, about a Black girl who longs for blue eyes, came out in 1970. She was 39. It did not sell well.

She kept the editing job for years while writing Sula and Song of Solomon. Beloved, published in 1987 and drawn from the true story of an enslaved woman who killed her daughter rather than see her returned to slavery, won the Pulitzer Prize after a group of writers protested publicly that she had been overlooked.

In 1993 she became the first Black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. She taught at Princeton until 2006 and wrote into her eighties, insisting that her books were not about race so much as about people.