When Toni Morrison enrolled at Howard University in 1949, she planned to study literature, but ended up with much more than a book education. She confronted institutionalized racism in segregated Washington, D.C., and learned about the skin color-based caste system on campus. Morrison, who died Monday night at the age of 88, would go on to write prize-winning work focused on the African American experience, and in 1993 would become the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Morrison won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 for Beloved, a Civil War-era story of an enslaved African American woman who escaped to Ohio. Oprah Winfrey produced and starred in a 1998 movie based on the book.

Morrison herself grew up in small-town Ohio. She was born Chloe Wofford, but started going by “Toni” when she got to Howard (the nickname comes from Anthony, the name of her baptismal saint). She began her studies in the English department but spent a lot of her time within the drama department.

“The criteria for excellence had nothing to do with color. It had only to do with talent,” she told Terry Gross in a 2015 interview on “Fresh Air” about her interest in theater.

“She had this wide-ranging personality at Howard, where she was able to be a part of a larger community,” said Dana Williams, an African American literature professor at Howard University and the president of the Toni Morrison Society. Morrison was a homecoming queen, an actress and the dean of pledgees for Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.

It was in D.C. that Morrison faced segregation in a different form than that what she’d grown up with in Ohio. “It was the first time that she wasn’t able to try on clothes in a store. Even when she was working full-time, she wasn’t able to get credit,” Williams said.

Morrison graduated in 1953 with a major in English and minor in classics and went on to get her master’s at Cornell University. She returned to Howard in 1958 to teach, and it was then that she began to write seriously. She joined a faculty writers group and started sharing the stories she wrote in the free moments between teaching and taking care of her two young sons. One time, she told Gross, she was so intent on recording a sentence that she wrote it around a bit of her baby’s vomit that had gotten on her legal pad.

“My older son was barely walking, and he spit up on the [paper]…I wrote around the puke because I figured I could always wipe that away, but I might not get that sentence again.”

Morrison and her husband, architect Harold Morrison, divorced after seven years of marriage; she never remarried. She moved to New York for a job as a book editor, where she cultivated black talent like Angela Davis.

She published her first book, The Bluest Eye, in 1970. It was based on a short story she wrote for her writers group at Howard. She went on to publish ten more novels, two plays and more than a dozen works of non-fiction and children’s literature.

In 2012, Morrison was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama, the country’s highest civilian honor.

The author died at Montefiore Medical Center in New York.

https://twitter.com/AAKnopf/status/1158734208598257664

A Knopf spokeswoman told the New York Times that the cause of death was complications of pneumonia.

This story originally appeared on WAMU. It has been updated with comment from Dana Williams and the correct spelling of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.