The Bluest Eye (1970)
Her first novel: Pecola Breedlove, a Black girl in Lorain, Ohio, prays for blue eyes
Literature · Novelists
Toni Morrison
1931–2019 · American
African American literature; postmodernism
Toni Morrison, born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, was an editor at Random House before becoming one of the most celebrated American novelists. Her novels, including The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved, explore Black American life, slavery and its legacy with lyrical, mythic power. In 1993 she became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
How to spot them
- ▸Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio
- ▸Beloved: Sethe, the escaped slave who kills her daughter, based on Margaret Garner
- ▸Pecola Breedlove longs for blue eyes; Milkman Dead in Song of Solomon
- ▸First Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993)
- ▸Random House editor; Princeton professor; Presidential Medal of Freedom 2012
Key works
Sula (1973)
The friendship of Sula Peace and Nel Wright in the Bottom, a Black neighbourhood in Ohio
Song of Solomon (1977)
Milkman Dead's quest into his family's past; won the National Book Critics Circle Award
Tar Baby (1981)
Love and conflict between Jadine and Son on a Caribbean island
Beloved (1987)
The formerly enslaved Sethe is haunted by the daughter she killed; won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize
Jazz (1992)
A love triangle and murder in 1920s Harlem, told in an improvisatory voice
Playing in the Dark (1992)
Critical study of the Africanist presence in white American literature
A Mercy (2008)
Enslaved and indentured women in 1680s colonial America
Key ideas
- Centred Black American, especially Black women's, experience without explaining it to a white audience
- The trauma and memory of slavery ('rememory' in Beloved)
- Folklore, myth, music and the supernatural woven into realist narrative
Quick-fire facts
- •Took the name 'Toni' from Anthony, the saint's name she chose at her Catholic baptism
- •Studied at Howard University and Cornell University
- •As a senior editor at Random House she published Black writers including Angela Davis and Gayl Jones
- •Beloved was inspired by Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave who killed her daughter in 1856 to prevent her recapture
- •Beloved won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was filmed in 1998 with Oprah Winfrey
- •Won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Black woman to do so
- •Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2012
- •In a 1998 New Yorker essay she called Bill Clinton 'our first black President'
- •Died in New York in 2019
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Sources
- The Nobel Prize — Toni Morrison: Facts
- Danille Taylor-Guthrie (ed.) — Conversations with Toni Morrison