Toni Morrison

2 Pages 579 Words

From her chldhood days in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison learned from her parents, Ramah Willis Wofford and George Wofford, 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 Blues Eye and in many of her other works.

Morrison was born Chole 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 Player. In 1955, Morrison earned an M.A. In English. Again, events at Howard were pivotal as she met her husband, Howard Morrison, a Jamaican architect, ther. 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 iwth 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 Ramdon House in New York and began writing regularly for the New York...