Speaking after the Cincinnati premiere of the opera Margaret Garner in 2005, Morrison recounted being told that she had won the Nobel Prize. A colleague from Princeton had called her early in the morning with the news, which was broadcast on television before Morrison had even been told. That afternoon, the chair of the selection committee called her from Stockholm to confirm the award. “Could you put that in writing?” Morrison asked the judge, and it was not until the decision came through on the fax machine that she really believed it was true. “I mean, you know,” she told her Cincinnati audience, “I’m just a girl from Lorain.”

So much you need to know about Toni Morrison is contained within that anecdote, not least her humorous-and-yet-dignified mode of self-presentation. To think of her as “just a girl from Lorain” is of course absurd – she could never be “just” anything – and yet her birthplace, which then became the setting for The Bluest Eye, is an unquantifiable part of who she is. And it is one of the paradoxes of her life story that, having risen to a position of huge success and wealth from humble origins and through gifts cultivated by immense hard work and sacrifice, her life story embodies the archetypal “American Dream” that her own novels subject to such skeptical scrutiny. There is to date no full-length authorized biography of Morrison to direct you to, no formal autobiography, and no published volumes of letters or diaries. There are, however, many wonderful interviews in which the author talks thoughtfully and in striking detail about her life and its relationship to her work. There are also the recent forewords to the Vintage editions of the novels, each of which gives a tantalizing glimpse of a different period in her life, and of its relationship to the novel being prefaced. Put together they do constitute life story of sorts. There already exist, as well, several biographical essays and chronologies of Morrison’s life and career; all of these have informed the account that I give here.