From Beloved to The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison understood the intricacies of the Black experience in America. The characters in her work were complex yet familiar. Morrison received many accolades, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Although she passed in 2019, she lives on in her words.

via NYPL

February 18 marks the birthday of Toni Morrison, one of the most highly celebrated American novelists of the latter 20th century and an icon of black literature and thought. In addition to a healthy body of short fiction, non-fiction, and theatre, Morrison has written 11 novels over the course of her near-50 year career, and has received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Nobel Prize in Literature, PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

All this to say, you should definitely be reading some Toni Morrison. Her writing is flat out gorgeous, mixing poetic and vernacular voices to create prose that sounds as lush as the vivid imagery it describes. Across her oeuvre, she has depicted and crystallized the black experience throughout American history, from colonial Virginia to slavery to the Korean War.

Read more and check out her work.