Toni Morrison

1931

I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me. --Salon Magazine

Toni Morrison, the daughter of Ramah and George Wofford, was born on February 18, 1931. Growing up in Lorain, Ohio, which was "an escape from stereotyped black settings -- neither plantation nor ghetto," Morrison, the second of four children, immersed herself in the close-knit community spirit and the folklore, myth, and supernatural beliefs of her culture.

A common practice in her family was storytelling; after the adults had shared their stories, the children told their own. The importance of listening to stories and of creating them complemented Morrison's profound love of reading. In an interview with Jean Strouse, Morrison shared described her childhood experiences with literature: "Those books were not written for a little black girl in Lorain, Ohio, but they were so magnificently done that I got them anyway -- they spoke directly to me out of their own specificity."

Upon graduating from high school, Morrison entered Howard to pursue a career in education. After obtaining a degree in English and in the classics, Morrison enrolled in graduate school at Cornell University where she wrote her master's thesis on the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. In 1955, Morrison began her teaching career at the Texas Southern University. She returned to Howard in 1957 as an English instructor and began working on her own writing. It was there that she met and married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect. They divorced in 1964, and Morrison moved to Syracuse, New York to become an editor for Random House. Raising her two sons, Harold Ford and Slade Kevin, Morrison continued working and writing.

After many rejections, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston accepted The Bluest Eye for publication in 1970. During this time, Morrison mentored African American women writers, including Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones and compiled and anthologized the works and histories of African-Americans. Subsequently, Morrison published Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, and most recently, Paradise. Her literary career is marked with many honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Robert F. Kennedy Award. Since 1988, Morrison has held the Robert F. Goheen Professorship of the Humanities at Princeton University and currently is the Chair of their Creative Writing Program. In 1993, Morrison was the first black woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. While giving a lecture at Princeton, Morrison was asked by a student "who she wrote for." She swiftly replied, "I want to write for people like me, which is to say black people, curious people, demanding people -- people who can't be faked, people who don't need to be patronized, people who have very, very high criteria." To this day, Toni Morrison continues to employ her "very, very high criteria" to challenge herself as both an educator and a writer.