Biography+and+Bibliography+of+Toni+Morrison

== Home <> Toni Morrison <> Sojourner Truth <> Supporting Articles <> Thesis and Critical Essay Synopsis <> Popular Cultural Texts == = = = Toni Morrison Biography =

Toni Morrison was born as Chloe Ardelia Wofford on Frebruary 18th, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio. She was the second of four children born to her parents George and Ramah who had moved to Ohio from the South in order to escape racism and find better opportunities. Morrison’s parents were quite proud of their heritage and as such she often heard songs and ales of Southern black folklore.

Morrison’s hometown of Lorain, the same town pictured in her first novel, the Bluest Eye, was one populated with immigrant Europeans, Mexicans, and Southern Blacks. Out of all the students in her first grade class, Toni was the only African-American, as well as the only one who could read. She went on to graduate from Lorain High School in 1949, with honors. Toni went on from high school to attend Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she majored in English, minored in classics, and would become a professor later in her life. Morrison graduated from Howard in 1953, continuing on to Cornell University where she received her master’s degree in 1955.

After graduation from Cornell, Toni became an English teacher at Texas Southern University. After just 2 years, in 1957, she returned to Howard University as a member of the faculty. It was during this time that she met many prominent members of the Civil Rights Movement. It was also during this time that she met a young Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison, who she then married in 1958.

In order to help cope with an unhappy married life with Harold, Toni joined a small writer’s group. It was for one of these meetings that Toni first began her story of //The Bluest Eye//. It began as a very short story about a girl she loosely knew when she was a child who had once prayed to God for blue eyes. Toni put it away and went many years without thinking about it until 1964, after she had divorced her husband and gotten a job with Random House in Syracuse, New York. It was at this time, while raising two young sons, that Morrison brought out her old story and decided to turn it into a novel.

Morrison was transferred to New York City in 1967 as senior editor at Random House. While she was editing books by prominent African-American authors such as Muhammad Ali and Angela Davis, she was busily attempting to get her own novel published. //The Bluest Eye// was finally published in 1970 to much critical acclaim. Soon thereafter, in 1971, Morrison began work on her second novel, //Sula//, a story of a friendship between to adult black women, which was published in 1973. This novel was nominated for the 1975 National Book Award in fiction. From 1976-1977, she was working on her third novel, //Song of Solomon//. In this novel Morrison decided to focus on strong male characters as opposed to the female characters she portrayed in //The Bluest Eye// and //Sula//. She was able to give this portrayal from her insight into the male world that she gained from raising two sons. This novel won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award //and// the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Then, in 1981, after being appointed to the National Council on the Arts, Morrison published her four novel, //Tar Baby//. It was within //Tar Baby// that Morrison first described the interaction between black and white characters. Perhaps Morrison’s most prestigious and well-known novel, //Beloved// was published in 1987. The story was influenced by a published story about a slave who had escaped with her two children from her master in Kentucky to Ohio. The story portrays the woman, Margaret Garner, trying to kill her children rather than have them return to slavery when they are about to be captured. This novel was a bestseller and in 1988, a year after it was published, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

In 1993, Toni Morrison received the Novel Prize in Literature. She was the eighth woman and the first African-American woman to do so. Since then Morrison has received a number of honors such as her selection by the National Endowment for the humanities for the Jefferson lecture, the U.S. federal government’s highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Additionally, Morrison was honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, an award given to a writer “who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work.”



** Bibliography of Toni Morrison's Works ** Novels

 * //T////he Bluest Eye// (1970)
 * //Sula// (1974)
 * //Song of Solomon// (1977)
 * //Tar Baby// (1981)
 * //Beloved// (1987)
 * //Jazz// (1992)
 * //Paradise// (1999)
 * //Love// (2003)
 * //A Mercy// (2008)

Children's literature (with her son, Slade Morrison)

 * //The Big Box// (1999)
 * //The Book of Mean People// (2002)

Short fiction

 * "Recitatif" (1983)

Plays

 * //Dreaming Emmett// (performed 1986)

Libretti

 * //Margaret Garner// (first performed May 2005)

Non-fiction

 * //The Black Book// (1974)
 * //Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination// (1992)
 * //Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality// (editor) (1992)
 * //Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case// (co-editor) (1997)
 * //Remember: The Journey to School Integration// (April 2004)
 * //What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction//, edited by Carolyn C. Denard (April 2008)

Works Cited

Century, Douglas Distinguished Women. Chelsea House Publishers, 1994. Web. 10 Dec. 2009 .

Johnson, Jone L. Women's History. About.com, 4 Nov. 2009. Web. 10 Dec. 2009 .

Allén, Sture Biography: Toni Morrison. NobelPrize.org, 1993. Web. 10 Dec. 2009 .