The celebrated novelist passed away on Monday night, according to publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Toni Morrison was best known for her best-selling novel Beloved, which took the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

She was the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

2. In 1993, Toni Morrison became the first African-American to be awarded a Nobel Prize for literature. pic.twitter.com/tURxjbnM8i — Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) August 6, 2019

Knopf said Morrison passed away at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York.

Morrison worked for 19 years as an editor at Random House, where she had become the first black women appointed to a senior editor role in the fiction department.

We are profoundly sad to report that Toni Morrison has died at the age of eighty-eight.“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019 pic.twitter.com/DWnElCpMKc — Alfred A. Knopf (@AAKnopf) August 6, 2019

Her acclaimed novel 'Beloved' was based on the tragic story of a mother who killed her baby to save her from a life of slavery.

She closed her Nobel Prize address with the words: "We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. The may be the measure of our lives."

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