Content Warning: This section discusses racism and violence.

Toni Morrison was an acclaimed writer whose work addresses the Black experience in America, especially the experiences of Black women. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for her novel Beloved and won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She was also an accomplished literary critic, and her nonfiction book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) examines canonical white American authors and how their work portrayed or responded to Blackness. Love, published in 2003, was her eighth novel and deals with many topics that recur across her work, including racism, colorism, and women’s experiences.

Morrison’s work is deeply shaped by her own experience growing up in America as a Black woman. She was born in Ohio in 1931 to working-class parents who had moved north during the Great Migration. Her father was raised in Georgia and had witnessed a lynching firsthand. Morrison later said that she believed that this trauma affected him his entire life, and he refused to allow white people inside their home. Morrison’s mother raised her with a strong appreciation for Black folklore, ghost stories, and music (Toni Morrison Remembers. BBC, 2015).