Canadians joined people around the world in mourning the death of American author and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, whose death at age 88 was announced early Tuesday morning.

Morrison was a pioneer and reigning giant of modern literature whose imaginative power in Beloved, Song of Solomon and other works transformed American letters by dramatizing the pursuit of freedom within the boundaries of race.

“Toni Morrison made language for us to live in. She broke language so we could live at all,” said award-winning Canadian poet, author and teacher Dionne Brand. “What magnificence, what a big life she is/was/had, and we too because of it. All of her books made the world better; she showed us the depth and breadth and generosity of Black people.”

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf announced that Morrison died Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. Morrison’s family issued a statement through Knopf saying she died after a brief illness.

“Toni Morrison passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends,” the family announced, saying she was a “consummate writer who treasured the written word” as well as “an extremely devoted mother, grandmother and aunt who reveled in being with her family and friends.”

Morrison was published in Canada by Knopf, founded here in 1992 by Louise Dennys with a list of just four books, of which Morrison’s Jazz was one.

Dennys remembers throwing a dinner at that time for Morrison at her partner’s apartment, with Margaret Atwood and others attending. Morrison’s “ferocious thinking” and generous “mind and heart” were in full force, and the party went on all night. “She was so full of life,” Dennys said. “She gave the entire world the gift of understanding more comprehensively what was happening and she wrote with such poetic beauty.”

Morrison was nearly 40 when her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published. By her early 60s, after just six novels, she had become the first Black woman to receive the Nobel literature prize, praised in 1993 by the Swedish academy for her “visionary force” and for delving into “language itself, a language she wants to liberate” from categories of black and white.

“Amongst the writers I had to gravitate towards to understand my own situation as a Black Nova Scotian, as an AfriCanadian … I had to pick up Toni Morrison and especially Song of Solomon,” said George Elliott Clarke, former Canadian parliamentary poet laureate. Her “textured English validated (our language) for us, validated our way of thinking.”

Morrison helped raise American multiculturalism to the world stage and helped uncensor her country’s past, unearthing the lives of the unknown and the unwanted, those she would call “the unfree at the heart of the democratic experiment.”

In her novels, history — Black history — was a trove of poetry, tragedy, love, adventure and good old gossip, whether in small-town Ohio in Sula or big-city Harlem in Jazz. She regarded race as a social construct and, through language, founded the better world her characters suffered to attain. Morrison wove everything from African literature and slave folklore to the Bible and Gabriel Garcia Marquez into the most diverse, yet harmonious, of literary communities.

Jael Richardson, author and founder of the Festival of Literary Diversity held in Brampton each year, said that “as a dual citizen (Canadian/American), Toni is like the Aretha Franklin of literature for me. She extends past the borders of America and her work is the voice of an era in time that is both painful and powerful.”

Morrison also had, as with so many authors, a profound affect on Richardson’s own writing. “Her novel Sula significantly shaped my debut novel,” says Richardson, “and it is a great loss to know that she is, physically gone. But she is — like all of the greats — forever with us with her work. She is American Literature. And that will never change.

Morrison, who won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Beloved, was also one of the book world’s most regal presences, with her expanse of greying dreadlocks; her dark, discerning eyes; and warm, theatrical voice, able to lower itself to a mysterious growl or rise to a humorous falsetto. “That handsome and perceptive lady,” James Baldwin called her.

The second of four children of a welder and a domestic worker, Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, a steel town outside of Cleveland. She was encouraged by her parents to read and to think, and was unimpressed by the white kids in her community. Recalling how she felt like an “aristocrat,” Morrison believed she was smarter and took it for granted she was wiser. She was an honours student in high school and attended Howard University because she dreamed of life spent among Black intellectuals.

At Howard, she met and married a Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison, whom she divorced in 1964. They had two children, Harold and Slade.

In 1964, she answered an ad to work in the textbook division of Random House. Over the next 15 years, she would have an impact as a book editor and as one of the few Black women in publishing, which alone would have ensured her legacy. She championed emerging fiction authors such as Gayl Jones and Toni Cade Bambara, helped introduce U.S. readers to such African writers as Wole Solinka, worked on a memoir by Muhammad Ali, and topical books by such activists as Angela Davis and Black Panther Huey Newton.

Her own debut as an author came at the height of the Black Arts Movement and calls for literature as political and social protest. But Morrison criticized by indirection; she was political because of what she didn’t say. Racism and sexism were assumed; she wrote about their effects, whether in The Bluest Eye or in Sula.

“The writers who affected me the most were novelists who were writing in Africa: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, was a major education for me,” Morrison told The Associated Press in 1998. “They took their Black world for granted. No Black writer (in America) had done that except for Jean Toomer with Cane.”

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She had no agent and was rejected by several publishers before reaching a deal with Holt, Rhinehart and Winston (now Henry Holt and Company), which released the novel in 1970. Sales were modest, but her book made a deep impression on the New York Times’ John Leonard, an early and ongoing champion of her writing, which he called “so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.”

Morrison’s breakthrough came in 1977 with Song of Solomon, her third novel. It was the first work by a Black writer since Richard Wright’s Native Son to be a full Book-of-the-Month selection and won the National Book Critics Circle award.

In November 2016, she wrote a highly cited New Yorker essay about the election of Donald Trump, calling his ascension to the presidency a mark of what whites would settle for to hold on to their status.

“So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenceless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble,” she wrote.

“William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In Absalom, Absalom, incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of Black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its ‘whiteness’ (once again), the family chooses murder.”

She taught for years at Princeton University, from which she retired in 2006, but also had an apartment in downtown Manhattan and a riverfront house in New York’s Rockland County that burned down in 1993, destroying manuscripts, first editions of Faulkner and other writers and numerous family mementoes. She had the house rebuilt and continued to live and work there.

“Toni Morrison is responsible for an entire literary tradition taking root in what seemed a doomed America. Every Black writer in the after-hours of her pen owes a great debt to her gifts,” said Canadian poet Canisia Lubrin. “So the next time someone tells me art can do nothing … I will point, without hesitation, to the works of Toni Morrison and say, here: read this.”