“No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.”

American novelist and editor

Toni Morrison was an American novelist and editor. She is known for novels that helped define late 20th century American literature, and she received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, appeared in 1970. Song of Solomon, published in 1977, brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She later won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved in 1988. Other works include Sula and the short story Recitatif.