<p>US author Toni Morrison, whose 1987 novel "Beloved" about a runaway slave won a Pulitzer Prize and contributed to a body of work that made her the first black woman to be presented the Nobel Prize in Literature, has died at the age of 88, her publisher said.</p>.<p>Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for the publishing company Alfred A. Knopf, announced the death but did not provide an immediate cause.</p>.<p>"Beloved" was set during the US Civil War and based on the true story of a woman who killed her 2-year-old daughter so she would not become a slave. The woman was captured before she could kill herself and the child's ghost, known as Beloved, visits her mother.</p>.<p>Morrison told NEA Arts magazine in 2015 that she had already written a third of the book before deciding to bring in the ghost to address the morality of whether the mother was right to kill the child.</p>.<p>The book was made into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey, who co-produced it, and Danny Glover.</p>.<p>The novel was part of a trilogy that Morrison said looked at love through the perspective of black history. "Jazz," published in 1992, was about a love triangle during the Harlem Renaissance in New York in the 1920s, and the third book, "Paradise," published in 1997, told of women in a small, predominantly black town. (Writing by Bill Trott; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Nick Zieminski)</p>
<p>US author Toni Morrison, whose 1987 novel "Beloved" about a runaway slave won a Pulitzer Prize and contributed to a body of work that made her the first black woman to be presented the Nobel Prize in Literature, has died at the age of 88, her publisher said.</p>.<p>Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for the publishing company Alfred A. Knopf, announced the death but did not provide an immediate cause.</p>.<p>"Beloved" was set during the US Civil War and based on the true story of a woman who killed her 2-year-old daughter so she would not become a slave. The woman was captured before she could kill herself and the child's ghost, known as Beloved, visits her mother.</p>.<p>Morrison told NEA Arts magazine in 2015 that she had already written a third of the book before deciding to bring in the ghost to address the morality of whether the mother was right to kill the child.</p>.<p>The book was made into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey, who co-produced it, and Danny Glover.</p>.<p>The novel was part of a trilogy that Morrison said looked at love through the perspective of black history. "Jazz," published in 1992, was about a love triangle during the Harlem Renaissance in New York in the 1920s, and the third book, "Paradise," published in 1997, told of women in a small, predominantly black town. (Writing by Bill Trott; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Nick Zieminski)</p>