Toni+Morrison

From her childhood days in Lorain, Ohio Toni Morrison learned from her parents, Ramah Willis Wofford and George Wofford, not only the importance of racial pride but also the tragedy that can result when a black person internalizes alien, often white, values. These lessons surface repeatedly in Morrison's first novel, ////The Bluest Eye////, and in many of her other works. Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, to parents who were very confident in themselves and their race. They stressed the importance of an education, which is reflected in the fact that Morrison was the only child entering her first grade class who could read. Her love of books continued as she devoured the works of European writers, including Jane Austen, Gustav Flaubert, and Leo Tolstoy as an adolescent.

After graduating from high school in Lorain with honors, Morrison earned a B.A. in English from Howard University. Two pivotal events for Morrison occurred at Howard: she changed her name to Toni because many people could not pronounce Chloe, and she became acquainted with black life in the South while touring with the Howard University Players. In 1955, Morrison earned an M.A. in English from Cornell and taught English at Texas Southern University for two years before returning to Howard in 1957 to teach English. Again, events at Howard were pivotal, as she met her husband, Howard Morrison, a Jamaican architect, there. Morrison rarely discusses her marriage, which ended in divorce after the births of two sons, Harold Ford and Slade Kevin.

Raising two sons alone, Morrison moved to Syracuse to take an editing job with a textbook subsidiary of Random House, and to combat isolation, she wrote. She first worked on a story she had begun in her writers group at Howard. This story about a little black girl who longs for blue eyes was the genesis of her first novel, ////The Bluest Eye////, published in 1970.

Since the appearance of ////The Bluest Eye////, Morrison's successes have multiplied. In 1970, she took an editorial position with Random House in New York and began writing regularly for //The New York Times// about black life. Her second novel, //Sula//, was published in 1973 and brought Morrison national acclaim. In 1977, her third novel, //Song of Solomon//, was chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection, the first book by a black writer to be chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son, in 1940. The novel also won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Morrison was awarded an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, as well as an appointment by President Carter to the National Council on the Arts. Morrison appeared on the cover of //Newsweek// at the publication of her fourth novel, //Tar Baby//, in 1981. She has received the most praise for her fifth novel, //Beloved//, which earned her a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Morrison's next novel, //Jazz//, was published in 1992. She has also written one play entitled //Dreaming Emmett//, which was performed in 1986; edited two books, //The Black Book// in 1974 and //Race-ing Justice//, //En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality// in 1992; published a book of literary criticism entitled //Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination// in 1992; and published one short story, "Recitatif," in //Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women//.

While continuing to write, Morrison has taught at such universities as State University of New York at Albany, Princeton, and Yale. Most notable of the awards she continues to garner is the Nobel Prize for Literature, which she won in 1993, making her the first African American to receive this honor.

"The Bluest Eye: Author Biography." __Novels for Students__. Ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1998. __eNotes.com__. January 2006. 31 October 2011. .