MORRISON, TONI 1931-

WRITER

Teacher

Toni Morrison never planned to become an author. Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, she changed her first name to Toni while attending Howard University and acquired her last name after a later marriage. Morrison excelled in the classics and received a master's degree from Cornell in 1955, after which she began teaching English at Texas Southern University and then at Howard. There she became influenced by a small group of poets and fiction writers, who encouraged her to work on a short story—the first she had ever attempted—about a young black girl's yearning for the white ideal of beauty and perfection. The story, which later became her first novel, was set aside while Morrison pursued a publishing career in the 1960s.

Champion

Morrison's editing talent and linguistic skill allowed her to move swiftly in her new career at Random House. She was promoted from textbook editor to senior editor in 1967 and soon became a specialist in black fiction. During eighteen years with the company, Morrison championed new writers such as Gayl Jones, Angela Davis, and Toni Cade Bambara. Meanwhile, she turned to writing again and found, to her surprise, that she had a natural ability with character. She expanded her short story into The Bluest Eye, drawing on her upbringing and neighborhood memories to create a strong portrait of black family life. Critics hailed Morrison as a significant new voice in fiction.

Themes

One of Morrison's motivations to write was the desire to create three-dimensional portrayals of African-Americans. Her philosophy, "there are no boring black people," served her well as she drew from life experience in her work. Her fiction emphasized the importance of history and myth, instilled in the author by her grandmother and by the unique characters she encountered growing up in an all-black neighborhood. Morrison was fascinated by the complications of black life and strove to create in her writing strong relationships between people and the earth, community, work, family, and each other. As she developed her talent, Morrison realized that writing was "the one thing I have no intention of doing without,"

Breakthrough

Sula reflected society's (and the black community's) shift from the mass struggles of the 1960s to the more personal ones of the 1970s. The title character, in her search for an individual identity, refuses to follow the codes and standards of her neighborhood and the black community at large. The story also explored the bond of friendship between African-American women. Although Sula was acclaimed, Morrison's true break-through came with Song of Solomon. The author used fantasy, allegory, and fable to illuminate the main character's search for his personal heritage. Morrison made his struggle for self-discovery a universal experience and in the process found best-seller status. Song of Solomon received the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and the American Academy and Institute of Art and Letters and Letters prize. Soon after, she was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the National Council on the Arts.

Success

Morrison lectured at Yale University from 1975 through 1977 and was appointed associate professor at the State University of New York, Purchase. Her literary success continued in the 1980s with the publication of Tar Baby (1981), which landed Morrison on the cover of Newsweek. Her follow-up, Beloved (1987), was a modern slave narrative and is considered her finest work. Although it missed winning the National Book Award (in a controversial decision many claimed was racist), Beloved received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. In 1989 Morrison became a humanities professor at Princeton University. In 1993 she won the Nobel Prize for literature.