The celebrated novelist Toni Morrison died Monday night, according to a source at her publisher, Knopf. She was 88 years old. The cause of death is not yet known. 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.

Before she was a world-renowned author, Morrison broke barriers as an editor for Random House, where she worked for 19 years, giving space to a new generation of black writers including Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and Angela Davis. She was also the Chair of Humanities at Princeton, where she taught from 1989 to 2006…