Before she rose

Her first novel was rejected by publishers and sold modestly. For years, her work was considered too specific, too Black, too female for a mainstream audience.

She was told that the audience for her books was too small. That she was writing for a niche. That to reach a wider readership, she would need to explain herself more. She refused. She kept writing the books she wanted to read.

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Toni Morrison

1931–2019 · Lorain, Ohio, USA

She was 39 when her first novel was published. She had two young sons, a full-time job, and no one believed her book would sell.

If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.

— Toni Morrison

Chloe Wofford — who would become Toni Morrison — was a divorced mother of two, working as an editor at Random House in New York, when she finished her first novel. She wrote it in the early mornings, before her sons woke up. She wrote it at a time when no one was asking for the story she wanted to tell. She was 39 when "The Bluest Eye" was published. The first printing sold out of its small run. It took years for the world to understand what it had been given.

Her story

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Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for "Beloved" and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

She was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was 62.

She wrote every morning before her sons woke. She wrote at the kitchen table. She wrote in the gaps — the early hours, the late hours, the hours that belonged to no one else.

She said: "I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else.'"

"There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves... There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath... because such memory is unspeakable."

— Toni Morrison, in her essay "A Bench by the Road," on the absence of memorials to enslaved people

As an editor at Random House, she championed books by Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, and Muhammad Ali.

She used the platform she had earned to publish work that the industry would otherwise have dismissed. She kept the door open.

She said: "I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life."

She wrote about what others refused to look at directly. That was always the job.

What she taught us

◈Write the book you need to read — someone else needs it too.
◈The story they say is "too specific" is often the most universal thing.
◈If you have power, your job is to use it for someone else.

If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.

— Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison

Her story. Your life.

A question worth sitting with

Toni Morrison wrote in the early mornings before her sons woke up — the hours that belonged to no one else. What is the work you are doing in the margins of your life that deserves a larger space?

Take sixty seconds. Just sit with it.

A letter from her — to you

Dear you, I want to tell you something about writing the story no one is asking for. When I wrote "The Bluest Eye," there was no market demand for it. The industry was not waiting for a novel about a young Black girl in Ohio. I was not writing for the market. I was writing the book I had needed to exist and that did not. That is, I think, the only honest reason to make anything. Because it needs to exist. Because you have looked around and found it absent. Because you are the person who can bring it into being. I know what it feels like to be told that what you want to make is too specific. Too niche. Too you. That the audience for your true voice is too small to matter. Here is what I know: the more specifically and honestly you tell the truth of your own experience — the more precisely you refuse to generalize, to soften, to reach for universal appeal — the more deeply you will reach the people who have been waiting for exactly that story. You are writing for someone who has not yet found themselves in anything. They are waiting. Write for them. With love, Toni

Know someone who needs this story?

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