NEW YORK (AP) — Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison has died.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf says Morrison died Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. She was 88.

She was the first black woman to receive the Nobel literature prize, awarded in 1993. The Swedish academy hailed her use of language and her "visionary force."

Her novel "Beloved," in which a mother, Margaret, makes a tragic choice to murder her baby to save the girl from slavery, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Oprah Winfrey played Margaret in the 1998 film adaptation.

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford on Feb. 8, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison often wrote about the black female experience. Her first book was “The Bluest Eye” published in 1970, and it focused on a black girl who wants blue eyes like white girls.