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.
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.
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.
From: ELLE US
