Toni Morrison

Born Chloe Wofford in the steel town of Lorain, Ohio, she wrote her Cornell master's thesis on suicide in Faulkner and Woolf before spending nearly two decades as an editor at Random House (the first Black woman to hold a senior fiction post there), where she championed writers like Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones and shepherded Muhammad Ali's autobiography into print.

She wrote The Bluest Eye before dawn, raising two sons alone after her marriage ended, fitting a novel around a full-time job editing other people's books. Song of Solomon and Beloved followed across the next two decades, the latter drawn from the true story of an enslaved woman who killed her own child rather than see her re-enslaved.

In 1993 she became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature; she taught at Princeton for years afterward and died in 2019 at eighty-eight.