Toni Morrison Overview

Toni Morrison, arguably the most famous living African American author, was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 in Ohio. As a child, she was an avid and precocious reader, and her family of masterful storytellers raised her on a steady diet... [more]

Toni Morrison, arguably the most famous living African American author, was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 in Ohio. As a child, she was an avid and precocious reader, and her family of masterful storytellers raised her on a steady diet of tales and legends. She studied literature at Howard and Cornell; her honors thesis was a study of suicide in the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. After moving to New York in 1965, she began work on her first novel, "The Bluest Eye," which was published in 1970. The story of a young black girl who craves the kind of reality that she believes only enfranchised whites enjoy, the book expresses the deep, internal pain that can come from racial prejudice. The book was a critical and popular success, and Morrison continued her writing while teaching at several colleges and universities, including Bard, Yale, and Princeton. Her novel "Beloved," based on the story of a runaway slave woman, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. In 1993, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Often drawing initial inspiration from old photographs or newspaper stories, Morrison delineates the history of black experience in America through the lives and deaths of individual black women and men. As her characters confront the racism, sexism, and violence of American society, Morrison probes the deepest hearts of her readers, causing us to recognize our own connection to history. [show less]