The Princeton Seminar

The novelist who reorganised a canon spent her working days editing other writers.

Chloe Ardelia Wofford came out of Lorain, Ohio, born there on February 18, 1931, the second of four children of a shipyard welder named George Wofford and a homemaker named Ramah. Howard University gave her a BA in 1953, Cornell an MA in 1955. She taught at Texas Southern University and at Howard, married the Jamaican architect Harold Morrison in 1958, divorced him in 1964, and joined Random House as an editor in 1967, where she brought through the autobiographies of Muhammad Ali and Angela Davis, and The Black Book. Her own first novel, The Bluest Eye, appeared in 1970. She was thirty-nine. The rest followed: Sula in 1973, Song of Solomon in 1977, Tar Baby in 1981, Beloved in 1987 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988, Jazz in 1992, Paradise in 1997, Love in 2003, A Mercy in 2008, Home in 2012, God Help the Child in 2015. The 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature made her the first African American to hold it. The Presidential Medal of Freedom came in 2012. She died of pneumonia at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx on August 5, 2019, at eighty-eight.

Eleanor Whitlock's biography opens well before the first novel and follows the arc at the pace the work rewards: the Lorain childhood and the Howard years, the Random House editorship and The Black Book, the long stretch of writing done after the children were asleep, the Princeton lectureship and the founding of the Toni Morrison Society in 1993, the final years and the 2019 essays of The Source of Self-Regard.

What emerges is a portrait of ten works of fiction that the late twentieth-century American literary canon reorganised itself around, and of the editorial and teaching career that ran alongside them the entire time.