'Beloved' novel writer that was adapted into a film featuring Oprah Winfrey died on Monday night at the age of 88.
According to a source at her publisher, Knopf, the cause of her death is yet to be known.
Morrison was best known for her best-selling novel Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
She is also known for the influential novels Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1997).
Her latest book was ' God Help the Child', which was published in 2015.
Morrison wrote the book during her toughest times including the death of her son in 2010.
“I stopped writing until I began to think, he would be really put out if he thought that he had caused me to stop,” Morrison told Interview magazine in 2012.
Morrison was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature 1993 becoming the first black woman of any nationality
Morrison broke barriers as an editor for Random House, where she worked for 19 years.
She was also the Chair of Humanities at Princeton, where she taught from 1989 to 2006.
"We die,” Morrison closed her Nobel Prize address.
“That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
