Toni Morrison, a literary lion whose narrative voice soared from deep tenderness to searing power in “Beloved,” “Song of Solomon” and other novels, died Monday night in New York, her publisher Alfred A. Knopf said. She was 88 years old.

Ms. Morrison, who had a career as an editor before turning to fiction, created unforgettable worlds that chronicled the African-American experience. She collected literature’s highest honors, including the Nobel Prize in literature—the first black woman to do so—as well as the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988.

In her 1993 Nobel address, Ms. Morrison said: “The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie.” By Brenda Cronin

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