THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

Morrison was the first Black woman to receive the Nobel literature prize, awarded in 1993. Her novel Beloved—in which a mother, Margaret, makes a tragic choice to murder her baby to save the girl from slavery—won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988.

She also chaired the humanities department at Princeton University, where she taught from 1989 to 2006.

Director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' film Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am recently ran at Chicago's Music Box Theatre. In 2010, her novel A Mercy was a selection for One Book, One Chicago. Also, it was already slated to run at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St., Aug. 23-29.

Her last work, God Help the Child, was published in 2015.

Robert Gottlieb, Morrison's longtime editor at Knopf, said in a Random House statement: "She was a great woman and a great writer, and I don't know which I will miss more."

Sonny Mehta, chairman of Knopf, added, "Toni Morrison's working life was spent in the service of literature: writing books, reading books, editing books, teaching books. I can think of few writers in American letters who wrote with more humanity or with more love for language than Toni. Her narratives and mesmerizing prose have made an indelible mark on our culture. Her novels command and demand our attention. They are canonical works, and more importantly, they are books that remain beloved by readers."