Toni Morrison Biography and List of Works

American author awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, who in her work explores the black experience in a racist culture. She has been a member of both the National Council on the Arts and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Morrison has actively used her influence to defend the role of the artist and encouraged the publication of other black writers.

'"Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin? What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company."'
(from Nobel Lecture, 1993)

Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio. Her parents had moved to the North to escape the problems of southern racism and she grew up relatively unscarred by racial prejudices. Her family were migrants, sharecroppers on both sides. She spent her childhood in the Midwest and read voraciously, from Jane Austen to Tolstoy. Morrison's father, George, told her folktales of the black community, transferring his African-American heritage to another generation. In 1949 she entered Howard University in Washington, D.C. America's most distinguished black college. Morrison continued her studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She wrote her thesis on William Faulkner and VirginiaWoolf , and received her M.A. in 1955.

During 1955-57 Morrison was an instructor in English at Texas Southern University, at Houston, and taught in the English department at Howard. In 1964 she moved to Syracuse, New York, working as a textbook editor. She was transferred after eighteen months to the New York headquarters of Random House. She edited books by such black authors as Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones. She also continued to teach at two branches of the State University of New York. In 1984 she was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University of New York at Albany, where she nurtured young writers through two-year fellowships.

While working as an editor and caring for her children, Morrison wrote her first novel, THE BLUEST EYE, which appeared in 1970. It established the pattern of her later, more complex works of fiction. The story is set in the black community of a small, midwestern town, and its characters are all black. The book was partly based on her story written for a writers' group in 1966, which she joined after her six years marriage with the Jamaican architect Harold Morrison dissolved. The novel tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a black girl who believes everything would be all right if only she had beautiful blue eyes. SULA (1973) depicts two black woman friends and their community of Medallion, Ohio. It follows the lives of Sula and Nel from childhood to maturity and to death. The novel won the National Book Critics Award.

"I have to cry about this, Valerian though. I have got to shed tears about this. But not water, please God, may they be blood. I have to cry blood tears for his wounds. But I will need several lives, life after life after life, one for each wound, one for every trickle of blood, for every burn. I need a lifetime of blood tears for each of them."
(from Tar Baby, 1981)

With the publication of SONG OF SOLOMON (1973), a family chronicle compared to Arthur Haley's Roots, Morrison gained international attention. It was the main selection of the Book-of-the-month Club and the first novel by a black writer to be chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1949. The book traced Milkman Dead's efforts to recover his 'ancient properties', the family roots so important to Morrison. After the success of Song of Solomon Morrison bought a four-story house near Nyack, N.Y. In 1898 Morrison was named Robert Goheen Professor at the Humanities at Princeton University.

"So why is it on Thursday that the men look satisfied? Perhaps it's the artificial rhythm of the week - perhaps there is something so phoney about the seven-day cycle that body pays no attention to it, preferring triplets, duets, quartets, anything but a cycle of seven that has to be broken into human parts and the break comes on Thursday. Irresistible."
(from Jazz, 1992)

In 1988 Morrison received the Pulitzer Prize for the novel BELOVED (1987), which deals with slavery and infanticide. It was inspired by the true story of a black American slave woman, Margaret Garner, who killed her baby after the infamous 1870s Fugitive Slave Act in order to save the child from the slavery she had managed to escape. Morrison later stated, "I thought at first it couldn't be written, but I was annoyed and worried that such a story was inaccessible to art." The protagonist, Sethe, tries to kill her children but is successful only in murdering the unnamed infant, "Beloved." Her dead baby daughter haunts Sethe's house and Paul D., whom Sethe knew in slavery, comes to visit her. "For a used-to-be slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a crocker sack, well, maybe you'd have little love left over for the next one."

JAZZ (1992) was a fragmented narrative about the causes and consequences of a murder in Harlem in 1926. Morrison's first novel since the Nobel Prize, PARADISE, was published in 1998. The story, set in the tiny farming community of Ruby, Oklahoma, begins in the year 1976. Nine men attack a former girls' school nicknamed "the Convent," now occupied by unconventional women fleeing from abusive husbands, lovers, or otherwise unhappy pasts. Moving freely between eras, Morrison explores the founding of Ruby, an all-black township in Oklahoma, and the establishment of its predecessor, Haven, which parallels the story of Exodus: a band of former slaves wanders the Oklahoma territory in search of a homeland. But there are snakes in earthly paradise. Ruby is troubled by ancestral feuds and financial quarrels. A new minister with new ideas has come to town, and a scapegoat is needed to re-establish the imaginary utopia of community spirit.

For further reading: The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Tony Morrison by T. Otten (1989); Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Tony Morrison by T. Harris (1993); Tony Morrison's Fiction by J. Furman (1966); Tony Morrison, ed. by N.J. Peterson (1997); Tony Morrison, ed. by L. Peach (1998) - Note: Only nine women have received (1901-1997) the Nobel Prize for Literature: Selma Lagerlöf, Sigrid Undset, Grazia Deledda, Pearl S.Buck, Gabriela Mistral, Nelly Sachs, Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, Wislawa Szymborska

THE BLUEST EYE, (1970)