Toni Morrison Biography Born: February 18, 1931 African American
writer Toni Morrison is the first African American woman to win
the Nobel Prize for Literature. She is best known for her novels
focusing on intimate relationships, especially between men and
women. These stories are set against the backdrop of African
American culture. Birth and family history Toni Morrison was
born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, on February 18,
1931. She was the second of four children born to Ramah and
George Wofford. Her mother's parents, Ardelia and John Solomon
Willis, had left Greenville, Alabama, around 1910 after they
lost their farm because of debts that they could not repay.
Morrison's father's family left Georgia and moved north to
escape sharecropping (a system of farming in which a farmer
works on someone else's land and pays the owner a share of the
crop) and violence against African Americans in the South. Both
families settled in the steel-mill town of Lorain on Lake Erie.
Morrison grew up during the Gre