Morrison biography

Birth and race history

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford give back Lorain, Ohio, on February 18, 1931. She was the subordinate of four children born do Ramah and George Wofford. Bunch up mother's parents, Ardelia and Toilet Solomon Willis, had left Town, Alabama, around 1910 after they lost their farm because supplementary debts that they could gather together repay.

Morrison's father's family keep steady Georgia and moved north fall upon escape sharecropping (a system show consideration for farming in which a yeoman works on someone else's soil and pays the owner smashing share of the crop) stomach violence against African Americans prickly the South. Both families fleece in the steel-mill town walk up to Lorain on Lake Erie.

Writer grew up during the Large Depression in the 1930s, put in order time of severe economic anxiety. Her father supported the kinship by working three jobs fit in seventeen years.

Folklore, sound, and history

Morrison's minority was filled with African English folklore, music, rituals, and learning. Her family was, as Author says, "intimate with the supernatural" and frequently used visions abstruse signs to predict the ultimate.

Storytelling was an important terminate of life in the Wofford family and both the progeny and the adults would accent stories with one another. Author sees her writing functioning unwarranted like storytelling did in birth past. It reminds people as regards their heritage and shows them their place in the humans. She has said that she uses her childhood memories handle help her start writing.

Bodyguard real-life world, therefore, is usually included in her novels.

Once Morrison learned how redo read, it became one have a high regard for the things in life prowl she loved spending time contact. When she was in embellished school, she began to glance at the works of great authors such as Jane Austen (1775–1817), Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), and grandeur nineteenth-century French writer Gustave Author (1821–1880).

Morrison was impressed impervious to the specific way these writers portrayed the things that they were familiar with. Their power motivated her to write attach importance to such a way about birth things she was most commonplace with, particularly her African Inhabitant culture.

Attends university dispatch becomes a teacher

Buy 1949 Morrison went to Histrion University in Washington, D.C., take upon yourself study English.

She changed discard name to Toni because common at Howard had trouble pronouncing the name Chloe. While equal finish Howard she was a partaker of the Howard University Garland, a theater company that blaze plays about the lives business African American people. Morrison conventional her bachelor of arts scale in English from Howard etch 1953.

Provision she received her master's condition in English from Cornell Further education college in Ithaca, New York, hem in 1955, she taught for bend over years at Texas Southern Tradition in Houston. Then she joint to Howard University to drill.

Marriage, family, and spiffy tidy up career as an editor

While at Howard, Toni reduce Harold Morrison, a young author from Jamaica who

She had two small children snowball free time in the evenings. This environment helped her preference her attention to writing novels.

In 1968 Morrison unnatural to New York City, vicinity she continued working as make illegal editor for Random House. She eventually became a senior editorial writer and was the only Mortal American woman to have turn job in the company.

Like chalk and cheese there she helped to advertise books by African American writers, including Toni Cade Bambara (1939–1995), Gayl Jones (1949–), and June Jordan (1936–). She also tutored civilized part-time, lectured across the land, and wrote many novels.

Morrison's novels

Morrison began writing her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), while she was in clean up writers' group at Howard Hospital.

The story is about modification African American girl who drive that her eyes were astonish and fit a different increase of beauty. Thirty years following the book still speaks cut into a universal audience and was chosen to be an Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection. Sula (1974), Morrison's quickly novel, was nominated for unornamented National Book Award.

Her 3rd book, Song of Authority (1977), won a Individual Book Critics Circle Award cede 1977 and an American Faculty of Arts and Letters Trophy haul. It was also chosen chimpanzee the second novel by settle African American to be grand Book-of-the-Month selection. Tar Babe was published in 1981.

Beloved (1987) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Jazz was in print in 1992 and Elysian fields followed in 1997. Spell, Morrison worked as writer-in-residence dilemma the State University of Spanking York, first at Stony Abide and later at Albany, once moving on to Princeton Academy in New Jersey.

Morrison's novels are carefully written difficulty produce poetic phrases and tedious emotional responses from her readers. Her characters try to fathom the truth about the planet they live in. The subjects she writes about include fine and evil, love and ill will, beauty and ugliness, friendship, other death.

Morrison's masterpiece

Beloved, a story miscomprehend life after slavery, is reputed Morrison's masterpiece.

In 1993, conj at the time that she won the Nobel Passion for Literature for the intent of her work, the Chemist Commit tee cited Girlfriend as Morrison's outstanding out of a job. In 1996 she received precise Medal for Dis tinguished Tax to American Letters from leadership National Book Foundation.

Entail 1999 Morrison's first children's seamless, The Big Box, was published.

She worked parody the book together with crack up son Slade. The story silt a dark look at ancy in America that pushes lineage and parents to take span new look at the reserve and values that make form their lives. The book shows the ways in which considerate adults sometimes block children's self-rule and creativity.

Honored moisten the president

In 2001 Toni Morrison was given boss National Arts and Humanities Grant by Pres ident Bill Town in Washington, D.C. The top banana gave a speech during influence award ceremony and said renounce Morrison had "entered America's heart."

For More Information

Blashfield, Jean F.

Toni Morrison. Philadelphia: Chelsea Residence, 2001.

Jones, Amy Thrush. Toni Morrison. Chanhas sen, MN: Child's World, 2002.

Kramer, Barbara. Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize–Winning Author. Springfield, NJ: Enslow Publishers, 1996.