The celebrated novelist and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison passed away Monday night, according to a source at her publisher, Knopf. She was 88 years old.

Born Chloe Ardella Wofford, Morrison was best known for her critically acclaimed and best-selling novel Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among her other memorable and influential novels Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1997); the three books comprise a loose trilogy.

Just after the last of them was published, Morrison was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first black woman of any nationality to do so.