Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison Has Died at 88

(Image credit: Ilya S. Savenok)

published 6 August 19

Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning-novelist Toni Morrison has died at age 88. She died Monday night and the cause is not yet known, according to Vulture.

Her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, confirmed the news on Twitter, writing, "We are profoundly sad to report that Toni Morrison has died at the age of eighty-eight." The Knopf account also tweeted out a Morrison quote from her 1993 Nobel Lecture: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

"We are profoundly sad to report that Toni Morrison has died at the age of eighty-eight. She died last night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York," Paul Bogaards, EVP and director of communications of Knopf Doubleday told USA Today.

We are profoundly sad to report that Toni Morrison has died at the age of eighty-eight.“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019 pic.twitter.com/DWnElCpMKcAugust 6, 2019

As ELLE wrote back in 2015, "More than any other contemporary American writer...Toni Morrison has claimed the historically explosive, intertwined subjects of race and gender via a series of profound, nonpareil novels, beginning with The Bluest Eye in 1970."

Although Morrison is gone, her ineffable voice endures in her many critically-acclaimed novels, including The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Sula, and Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Toni Morrison was a towering intellect, a brilliant scribe of our nation’s complex stories, a heartbreaking journalist of our deepest desires, and a groundbreaking author who destroyed precepts, walls and those who dared underestimate her capacity. Rest well and in peace. pic.twitter.com/nMkxXRtEozAugust 6, 2019

I was lucky enough to have Toni Morrison deliver the commencement speech at my college graduation. She touched on the realities of the world that hadn’t happened yet, and didn’t bullshit a bunch of hopeful college grads. She is irreplaceable.August 6, 2019

“Word-work is sublime... because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference – the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” —Toni MorrisonAugust 6, 2019

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” RIP, Toni Morrison. https://t.co/DWF7sOFDbwAugust 6, 2019

I got in trouble for talking back a lot in middle school, and the in-school detention monitor let me spend time by myself in the library. That's where I found The Bluest Eye. It didn't make me want to be a writer, but it did make me want to read every other book in the library.August 6, 2019

I just can’t believe she’s gone.August 6, 2019

In 2012, President Obama awarded Morrison the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is the the highest civilian honor in the country. She was also the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her latest novel, God Help the Child, was published in 2015.

Rose Minutaglio

Rose is a Staff Writer at ELLE covering culture, news, and women's issues. She is an accomplished and compassionate storyteller who excels in obtaining exclusive interviews and unearthing compelling features.