Toni Morrison

American novelist who is the foremost literary voice of the African American experience and the trauma of slavery — winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Beloved: a former enslaved woman is haunted by the ghost of her dead infant, whom she killed to prevent re-enslavement — a novel about the psychological aftermath of slavery so powerful it redefined American literary history. Song of Solomon: Black American identity and myth. Jazz: Harlem, 1920s. The Bluest Eye: internalized racism in childhood. As an editor at Random House, she edited and championed Black American writers for decades.