AbeBooks: Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is an American author and professor. She was born Chloe Wofford in 1931 in Ohio, the second child in a black, working class family, and began reading avidly from a young age, favoring authors like Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. The child's keen interest in storytelling also prompted her father to recount fairytales and folklore from the black community, which would influence Morrison’s own writing.

After receiving her BA in English at Howard University (it was here she changed her name from Chloe to Toni), Morrison went to Cornell University to complete her MA, again in English. Her thesis explored themes of suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. Morrison returned to Howard, this time as an English professor. It was there she began writing fiction, including a story about a black girl who yearned for blue eyes. The story was the basis for her 1970 novel The Bluest Eye. Toni Morrison

From the very beginning, Morrison’s work heavily featured themes of the experiences of black women in a white, male-dominated society. Nevertheless, Morrison has shied away from calling her work feminist, as she feels that makes it inaccessible. She seeks, rather than replacing a patriarchy with a matriarchy, to create a framework for an equal society. Morrison married a fellow faculty member named Harold Morrison at Howard in 1958, had two children, divorced in 1964, and moved to New York, where she became an editor for Random House.

Morrison continued her love affair with teaching as well as writing. She taught English at two branches of the State University of New York, as well at Princeton. In her career she has published nine novels. She is best known for her fifth novel, Beloved, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Frederic G. Melcher Book Award. She was also awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature – the first black woman to receive the honor – in 1993.

Morrison retired from teaching in 2006, but still lectures and writes. Her most recent novel, A Mercy, was published in 2008, and tells the stories of mothers and daughters throughout slavery in early America. She has also written two children’s books, The Big Box and The Book of Mean People in collaboration with her youngest son, Slade Morrison.