The Magnitude of Toni Morrison

This morning, the publishing house Alfred A. Knopf announced that the celebrated writer Toni Morrison had died in New York at the age of 88 following a short illness. Of her inimitable legacy, the Morrison family issued a short statement, which read in part, “The consummate writer who treasured the written word, whether her own, her students or others, she read voraciously and was most at home when writing.”

Indeed, the literary titan born Chloe Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, was a paragon of scholarly dedication: She famously wrote her first novels on her cramped New York City subway commutes, while raising two sons. (“I’ve written on scraps of paper, in hotels on hotel stationery, in automobiles,” she once said. “If it arrives you know. If you know it really has come, then you have to put it down.”) She recorded her own audiobooks, because she alone knew how the words ought to sound. She wrote sentences as James Baldwin would later exhort writers to do: clean as a bone.