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.
The Bluest Eye
The Bluest Eye
Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison’s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.
“You can’t go wrong by reading or re-reading the collected works of Toni Morrison. Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Sula, everything else — they’re transcendent, all of them. You’ll be glad you read them.”–Barack Obama