Publisher Alfred A. Knopf says Morrison died Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. She was 88.
She was the first black woman to receive the Nobel literature prize, awarded in 1993. The Swedish academy hailed her use of language and her "visionary force."
Her novel “Beloved,” in which a mother makes a tragic choice to murder her baby to save the girl from slavery, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988.