The African-American writer Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, died at the age of 88, Monday, August 5, in the evening.

"Toni Morrison died peacefully last night, surrounded by family and friends," said a statement from his relatives, released Tuesday.

The text adds that the writer, also a Pulitzer laureate, died in a hospital in New York, after a short illness, without specifying which one.

Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize

Descendant of a family of slaves, Toni Morrison is known to have given black literary visibility. This brilliant scholar has written 11 novels over a span of six decades, but also essays, children's books, two plays and even an opera libretto.

Former Democratic President Barack Obama paid him a glowing tribute, calling it a tweet of "national treasure". "His writing was a superb and profound challenge to our conscience and our moral imagination," wrote the former president, who awarded the prestigious Medal of Freedom to the novelist at a ceremony at the White House on May 29 2012.

Toni Morrison was a national treasure, as good as a storyteller, as captivating, in person as she was on the page. Her writing was a beautiful, meaningful challenge to our conscience and our moral imagination. What a gift to breathe the same air, if only for a while. pic.twitter.com/JG7Jgu4p9t

Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 6, 2019

She has explored the entire history of black Americans since their enslavement until their emancipation in the current American society.

Born February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison, whose real name was Chloe Anthony Wofford, was a graduate of Howard University in Washington. She taught for a long time, also working in publishing, before publishing her first novel, "The Bluest Eye" in 1970, about a black girl who wants blue eyes, 39 years old. "The Bluest Eye" will be followed in 1977 by "Song of Solomon" (The Song of Solomon), awarded by the National Book Critics Circle Award.

His novel "Beloved" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Set during the American Civil War, the book tells the story of a woman who kills her two-year-old daughter so that she does not become a slave. The mother is arrested before she can kill herself and the ghost of her daughter, named Beloved, comes to visit her. "Beloved" is the first part of a trilogy dedicated to love from the angle of American black history. It was followed by "Jazz", published in 1992, which tells a love trio in Harlem of the 1920s, and "Paradise", published in 1997.

Toni Morrison had the sense of the formula, of which this one, which remained famous: "If there is a book that you would like to read, but which has not yet been written, then it is your duty to 'to write".

With AFP and Reuters