Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is the most prominent African-American writer in the United States. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She has also won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for her most renowned novel, Beloved.

In 2006, critic A. O. Scott said that Beloved, "has inserted itself into the American canon more completely than any of its potential rivals... This triumph is commensurate with its ambition, since it was Morrison's intention in writing it precisely to expand the range of classic American literature, to enter, as a living black woman, the company of dead white males like Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne and Twain."