Toni Morrison Passed Away!

Toni Morrison passed away.

Beautiful soul in a time of need.

Toni Morrison, the famed African American author who was best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved died at the age of 88. Morrison, who was nearly 40 when she published her first novel in 1970, wasn't an overnight success.

Former president Barack Obama tweeted a response to Morrison after her passing.

Toni Morrison was a national treasure, as good a storyteller, as captivating, in person as she was on the page. Her writing was a beautiful, meaningful challenge to our conscience and our moral imagination. What a gift to breathe the same air as her, if only for a while. pic.twitter.com/JG7Jgu4p9t

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 6, 2019

Oprah Winfrey, the media mogul who helped propel Morrison into fame tweeted today.

Toni Morrison 🙏🏾 pic.twitter.com/nVjs88kTeg

— Oprah Winfrey (@Oprah) August 6, 2019

Morrison is one of the world's most influential writers. She passed away after a short bout of illness according to her family.

She was an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher and professor emeritus at Princeton University.

Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford) was born in Lorain, Ohio, a city that was divided on racial lines and the golden boom of industrialism. Her family fled the south to settle in Ohio. Her mother grew up in Greenville, Alabama and her father grew up in Cartersville, Georgia.

She said that her father was 15 years old when a mob of white people lynched two black businessmen on his street. She said that he was traumatized by this. He would flee the South to settle in Lorain.

Lorain was safer but was deeply segregated. The city was booming with steel manufacturing. Her father, George was working odd jobs and trying to make ends meet for Toni and her three siblings.

Her mother Ramah was a homemaker and devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She would often take the children to church and taught Sunday school.

Toni had two sons. Her oldest son Harold (left) and Slade (center). Slade passed away of cancer in 2010.

When Morrison was about two years old, her family's landlord set fire to the house they lived in, while they were at home. The family were struggling to pay the rent and the landlord was demanding they pay up or pay the price.

She would learn how the world worked at an early age. She started to engage in reading of Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. She would start learning about African heritage and American history.

She would learn about African-American folktales and ghost stories and spiritual songs.

She would become a Catholic at the age of 12 and took the baptismal name of Anthony (the Saint Anthony), which led to her pen name of Toni.

After attending Lorain High School, she would enroll in Howard University seeking the knowledge of her fellow Black intellectuals. The University of Washington, DC were she took classes at also was considered very segregated at the time. She would learn how our nation's capital became a focal point of her writing. She saw racially segregated restaurants and buses in our nation's capital.

She would get married to Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect in 1958. She would get pregnant while in Washington and gave birth to her first son, Harold, Jr. while in college. Before she divorced her husband, she gave birth to her second son, Slade.

Slade would die of pancreatic cancer.

Morrison began her storied career in letters as a college instructor at Texas Southern University and later at Howard, her alma mater.

In 1963, she took a position as a book editor at Random House based in Syracuse, New York, where she worked for 20 years before leaving in 1983. Morrison was editing the works of others when she published her first novel at age 39.

"I didn't become interested in writing until I was about 30 years old," she later said. "I didn't really regard it as writing then, although I was putting words on paper. I thought of it as a very long, sustained reading process -- except that I was the one producing the words."

President Barack Obama awarded Toni Morrison a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

"The Bluest Eye," about an impoverished and abused black girl who longs for blue eyes, was met with middling reviews but gained prestige when it was added to the City University of New York curriculum.

"Required reading," Morrison has said. "Therein lies the success."

The novel has been challenged and called offensive over the years by parents in communities across the country who say the subject matter, which involves incest and violence, is too raw for young readers.

Morrison went on to pen roughly a dozen novels, most lauded among them 1987's "Beloved," about a former slave who kills her baby to ensure it is never enslaved. "Beloved" won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Her non-fiction work included 1974's collection of African-American historical ephemera "The Black Book," 1992's "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination" and 2004's "Remember: The Journey to School Integration."

A regal presence who'd come to be associated with her crown of gray dreadlocks, Morrison had amassed a body of work that rivaled the most decorated American novelists by the late 1980s, though according to some she had not been fully recognized as the literary institution she was. Morrison herself had championed the work of black writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones and Angela Davis while at Random House.

In 1988, a group of 48 black writers and thinkers published a statement in The New York Times in support of Morrison and other black writers and critical of the literary establishment, which seemed to have gone out of its way to pass them over for major writing awards.

"Despite the international stature of Toni Morrison, she has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve: She has yet to receive the keystone honors of the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize," read the statement.

She received the Pulitzer for "Beloved" two months later.

The novel was adapted into a 1998 film directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover and Thandie Newton. The movie was not a success.

Morrison encountered personal tragedy in 1993 when her home burned down, and in 2010 with the death of her son Slade at age 45 from pancreatic cancer. She had collaborated with Slade, a visual artist whom she called a "brilliant writer," on a series of children's books.

The lows were countered by the highest of heights. The same year her son died, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for her body of work to that point.

"One can delight in her unique narrative technique, varying from book to book and developed independently, even though its roots stem from Faulkner and American writers from further south.

The lasting impression is nevertheless sympathy, humanity, of the kind which is always based on profound humour," said the Nobel committee in announcing the award in 1993.

President Barack Obama awarded Morrison the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 -- the loftiest US honor for a civilian.

The author preferred to let her work speak for her, often appearing publicly as an inscrutable grand dame, reluctant to talk about personal affairs. However, writing, she said, was the one space where she really could be larger than life.

"All of my life is doing something for somebody else," Morrison told New York magazine in 2012.

"Whether I'm being a good daughter, a good mother, a good wife, a good lover, a good teacher -- and that's all that. The only thing I do for me is writing. That's really the real free place where I don't have to answer."

Given that independence, it was perhaps ironic that she stuck with her married name on her books. ("Toni" was a high school nickname.) She'd used it for "The Bluest Eye" and later regretted it, she said.

"Wasn't that stupid?" she said. "I feel ruined!"

The people who know her best call her Chloe, she added.

"Chloe writes the books."

Morrison, author of seminal works of literature on the black experience such as "Beloved," "Song of Solomon" and "Sula" and the first African-American woman to win a Nobel Prize, has died, her publisher Knopf confirmed to CNN.

Morrison's novels gazed unflinchingly on the lives of African Americans and told their stories with a singular lyricism, from the post-Civil War maelstrom of "Beloved" to the colonial setting of "A Mercy" to the modern yet classic dilemmas depicted in her 11th novel, "God Help the Child."

Her talent for intertwining the stark realities of black life with hints of magical realism and breathtaking prose gained Morrison a loyal literary following. She was lauded for her ability to mount complex characters and build historically dense worlds distant in time yet eerily familiar to the modern reader.

Morrison was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Humanities Medal, the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.