Famous Novelist Toni Morrison dies at 88

Born Chloe Ardella Wofford, Toni Morrison was an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher and professor emeritus at Princeton University

she is the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. She died following a brief illness, her family said in a statement on Tuesday. She was 88. The he cause of death is not yet known

Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved. The novel was adapted into a film of the same name in 1998. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993

Morrison's latest novel, God Help the Child, was published in 2015. She wrote through the toughest of times, including the death of her son in 2010.

Around the release of her 9th novel, Home, in 2012, Morrison told Interview magazine: "I stopped writing until I began to think, he would be really put out if he thought that he had caused me to stop."