Author Toni Morrison, a literary legend who rose to become one of the most inspirational figures in American writing and the first black woman to win a Nobel Prize in literature, died Monday. She was 88.

Her family said on Tuesday that the former professor passed away after a brief illness at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx.

“Toni Morrison passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends,” the family said in a statement Tuesday. “The consummate writer who treasured the written word, whether her own, her students or others, she read voraciously and was most at home when writing.”

Morrison, who published her first novel, “The Bluest Eyes,” in 1970, became a Nobel laureate in 1993. Her list of major awards also includes the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for “Beloved,” and a Presidential Medal of Freedom bestowed by Barack Obama in 2012.

“Her writing was not just beautiful but meaningful — a challenge to our conscience and a call to greater empathy,” Obama wrote on his Facebook page Tuesday.

Morrison wrote 11 novels, five children’s books, two plays and an opera.

New York Public Library president Anthony Marx called her death “devastating.”

“We will miss her amazing spirit, insight, wisdom, and friendship, and we will treasure her corpus all the more,” Marx said in a statement.

She was one of the book world’s most regal presences, known for her graying dreadlocks, dark and warm theatrical voice. “That handsome and perceptive lady,” James Baldwin once called her.

Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on Feb. 18, 1931, she was the second of four children born to a welder and a domestic worker in Lorain, Ohio, a steel town outside of Cleveland.

An honors student in high school, she went on to graduate in 1953 from Howard University, where she later taught creative writing and literature — one of several colleges where she would teach part-time over a five-decade period.

Morrision also taught at Yale University, SUNY Purchase, Bard College, Rutgers University, SUNY Albany and Princeton University, where she retired as Robert F. Goheen chair in the humanities in 2006.

It was during her years at Howard that she met architect Harold Morrison, whom she married in 1958. They had two children before divorcing in 1964.

She then began working on “The Bluest Eyes,” the story of a young black girl who is obsessed with the standards of white beauty.

“I wanted to read this book and no one had written it, so I thought that maybe I should write it in order to read it,” she told The Guardian during a 2015 interview.

The novel set the tone for Morrison’s literary voice, with her characters often struggling with slavery, segregation and separation.

Her novel, “Beloved,” focused on a mother who has to make a choice whether to kill her baby daughter to save her from ­slavery.

“I can think of few writers in American letters who wrote with more humanity or with more love for language than Toni,” said Sonny Mehta, chairman of publisher Alfred A. Knopf.

Additional reporting by Rob Bailey-Millado and Wires