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60 free Toni Morrison trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Toni Morrison trivia quiz follows the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature from a working-class childhood in Lorain, Ohio, to the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The early questions cover her real name, her Catholic baptism, her degrees from Howard and Cornell, and the years she spent as a Random House editor bringing Muhammad Ali, Angela Davis and Gayl Jones into print while writing The Bluest Eye at four in the morning. The middle of the quiz turns to the novels themselves: Sula, Song of Solomon and Tar Baby, then Beloved and its inspiration in the Margaret Garner case, the protest letter that preceded its Pulitzer, the trilogy it began with Jazz and Paradise, and the later books Love, A Mercy, Home and God Help the Child. There are questions on the plots and characters, on the 1998 film, on Oprah's Book Club and on Morrison's plays, opera libretto and criticism. The final questions cover her Nobel lecture, her Princeton years, her politics, her death in 2019 and the honors that followed. Some questions are easy for anyone who has read Beloved; others will test devoted readers. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on Morrison and her novels.
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Q 01What was Toni Morrison's name at birth?
Chloe Ardelia Wofford
She became a Catholic at 12 and took the baptismal name Anthony, after Anthony of Padua, which was shortened to the nickname Toni.
Q 02In which Ohio town was Morrison born and raised?
Lorain
The town west of Cleveland is also the setting of her debut novel, and since 2019 it has marked her birthday, February 18, as Toni Morrison Day.
Q 03Her nickname 'Toni' came from the baptismal name she took when she became a Catholic at 12. What was it?
Anthony
She chose it after Anthony of Padua; at Lorain High School she was on the debate team, the yearbook staff and in the drama club.
Q 04What did Morrison's family's landlord do when her parents couldn't pay the rent?
Set fire to their house
The family responded to what she called this 'bizarre form of evil' by laughing at the landlord rather than falling into despair.
Q 05Which two authors were among Morrison's favorites as a child?
Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy
Her parents also passed on a sense of heritage through African-American folktales, ghost stories and songs.
Q 06Morrison's father worked odd jobs and as a welder for which company?
U.S. Steel
George Wofford had left Georgia after witnessing the lynching of two Black businessmen on his street, hoping to find work in Ohio's industrial economy.
Q 07From which university did Morrison graduate in 1953 with a B.A. in English?
Howard
She had first enrolled in the drama program there in 1949, and toured the Deep South with the university's theatre troupe, the Howard Players.
Q 08Morrison's 1955 master's thesis compared the treatment of 'the alienated' by which two writers?
Woolf and Faulkner
She wrote it at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, before teaching English at Texas Southern University in Houston.
Q 09Where did Morrison earn her Master of Arts degree in 1955?
Cornell University
She lodged near Calvary Baptist Church in Ithaca during her first year, and later returned as an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large from 1997 to 2003.
Q 10Harold Morrison, whom she married in 1958, was an architect from which country?
Jamaica
They had two sons before divorcing in 1964; she kept his surname and became known as Toni Morrison.
Q 11At which publisher did Morrison become the first Black woman senior editor in the fiction department?
Random House
She began at its textbook division L. W. Singer in Syracuse in 1965 and transferred to New York City two years later.
Q 12Morrison edited the 1975 autobiography The Greatest: My Own Story by which sports figure?
Muhammad Ali
As an editor she also championed Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, Huey Newton, Gayl Jones and the murdered poet Henry Dumas.
Q 13Which 1974 anthology of photographs and documents of African-American life did Morrison edit?
The Black Book
Random House had been unsure about the project, but the Cleveland Plain Dealer predicted it would 'go like hotcakes'; it was while compiling it that she found the Margaret Garner story.
Q 21How did Macon Dead III get the nickname 'Milkman'?
His mother was still breastfeeding him at four
One of his father's employees witnessed it; the novel opens with an insurance agent named Robert Smith jumping off a roof while trying to fly.
Q 22In Morrison's third novel, what is the name of Milkman's aunt, a bootlegger and conjure woman?
Pilate
She keeps a heavy bag hanging from her ceiling that Milkman and his friend Guitar steal, believing it holds gold; it holds human bones.
Q 23In which 1981 novel does the fashion model Jadine fall in love with a penniless drifter named Son?
Tar Baby
Q 14What was the title of Morrison's first novel, published in 1970?
The Bluest Eye
It grew from a short story she brought to a writers' group at Howard about a Black girl who longed to have blue eyes; she wrote it getting up at 4 am while raising two children alone.
Q 15How old was Morrison when her first novel was published?
39
The book sold poorly at first until the City University of New York put it on the reading list for its new Black studies department.
Q 16Which Knopf editor went on to edit all but one of Toni Morrison's novels?
Robert Gottlieb
John Leonard's favorable New York Times review had called the debut 'history, sociology, folklore, nightmare and music'.
Q 17Morrison's debut is narrated mostly by which daughter of Pecola's foster parents?
Claudia MacTeer
Nine-year-old Claudia and her sister Frieda take Pecola in after her father burns down the family home; the chapter titles are fragments of the Dick and Jane primer.
Q 18In Morrison's debut, what does Pecola Breedlove wish for in an attempt to be beautiful?
Blue eyes
She equates the trait with whiteness, and turns at last to a fake spiritual healer called Soaphead Church to grant the wish.
Q 19What is Morrison's second novel, about a friendship between two Black women, called?
Sula
Barbara Smith's 1977 essay 'Toward a Black Feminist Criticism' argued that it posed lesbian and feminist questions about Black women's autonomy.
Q 20Which Morrison novel follows Macon 'Milkman' Dead III from birth to adulthood?
Song of Solomon
It was a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, the first novel by a Black writer so chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940, and it won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
It was the first of her novels to be given a contemporary setting.
Q 24After leaving publishing in 1983, Morrison lived in a converted boathouse on which river?
The Hudson
It was at that boathouse in Nyack, New York, that she said she 'saw' the image of a woman walking out of the water in a nice hat, the seed of Beloved's title character.
Q 25Morrison's first play, produced in 1986, concerns the 1955 murder of which Black teenager?
Emmett Till
Commissioned by the New York State Writers Institute at Albany, it was produced in 1986 by Capital Repertory Theatre and directed by Gilbert Moses.
Q 26Beloved was inspired by which enslaved woman, who killed her daughter rather than see her re-enslaved?
Margaret Garner
Morrison found her story in an 1856 newspaper article while compiling The Black Book; Garner had fled Kentucky to Cincinnati with her family in January 1856.
Q 27At what address in Cincinnati is the haunted house in Beloved?
124 Bluestone Road
The novel opens there in 1873 with Sethe and her 18-year-old daughter Denver, whose brothers Howard and Buglar had already fled the ghost.
Q 28What is the Kentucky plantation where Sethe and Paul D were enslaved in Beloved called?
Sweet Home
Paul D's arrival from the plantation drives out the spirit haunting the house, shortly before a young woman calling herself Beloved appears.
Q 29Beloved's dedication reads 'Sixty Million and more'. To whom does it refer?
Africans killed by the Atlantic slave trade
The epigraph comes from Romans 9:25: 'I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.'
Q 30For how many weeks was Beloved a bestseller after its 1987 publication?
25
Margaret Atwood wrote in The New York Times that the novel would put to rest any doubts about Morrison's stature as a pre-eminent American novelist.