TONI MORRISON
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (1931-2019) was born and raised in Lorain, Ohio. She went to Howard University in Washington DC for an undergraduate degree, then Cornell University for her M.A. Almost a decade passed (marriage, children, divorce) before she became the first female black editor at Random House in 1967. In 1970 she published The Bluest Eye, a signal debut, and by 1975 her writing career moved her out of editing and into a rise to one of the premier novelists in the United States. In 1987 she published Beloved, her epic ghost story in a sense, which earned her financial security, a nationwide bestseller for half a year. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 for her lifetime of work to date. She was the first black woman of any nation to win the prize. The eminence of being recognized as a world writer did not stop or slow down her writing or teaching (fellowships, lectureships, as befit her position). She died August 5, 2019, at 88 years.
God Help the Child
God Help the Child
A fiery and provocative novel, God Help the Child weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult.
At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger. Rain, the mysterious white child with whom she crosses paths. And finally, Bride’s mother herself, Sweetness, who takes a lifetime to come to understand that “what you do to children matters. And they might never forget.”
A New York Times Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kansas City Star.