Toni Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.[2]
For the rugby league footballer, see Tony Morrison. For the American politician, see deLesseps Morrison Jr.
Toni Morrison
August 5, 2019 (aged 88)
Bronx, New York, U.S.
- Novelist
- essayist
- children's writer
- professor
- The Bluest Eye (1970)
- Sula (1973)
- Song of Solomon (1977)
- Tar Baby (1981)
- Beloved (1987)
2
Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. Morrison earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her novel Beloved was made into a film in 1998. Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience.
The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities, in 1996. She was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on May 29, 2012. She received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. Morrison was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020.
Early years[edit]
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford,[3] the second of four children from a working-class, Black family, in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford.[4] Her mother was born in Greenville, Alabama, and moved north with her family as a child. She was a homemaker and a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.[5] George Wofford grew up in Cartersville, Georgia. When Wofford was about 15 years old, a group of White people lynched two African-American businessmen who lived on his street. Morrison later said: "He never told us that he'd seen bodies. But he had seen them. And that was too traumatic, I think, for him."[6] Soon after the lynching, George Wofford moved to the racially integrated town of Lorain, Ohio, in the hope of escaping racism and securing gainful employment in Ohio's burgeoning industrial economy. He worked odd jobs and as a welder for U.S. Steel. Traumatized by his experiences of racism, in a 2015 interview Morrison said her father hated Whites so much he would not let them in the house.[7]
When Morrison was about two years old, her family's landlord set fire to the house in which they lived, while they were home, because her parents could not afford to pay rent. Her family responded to what she called this "bizarre form of evil" by laughing at the landlord rather than falling into despair. Morrison later said her family's response demonstrated how to keep your integrity and claim your own life in the face of acts of such "monumental crudeness".[8]
Morrison's parents instilled in her a sense of heritage and language through telling traditional African-American folktales, ghost stories, and singing songs.[5][9] She read frequently as a child; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy.[10]
Morrison became a Catholic at the age of 12[11] and took the baptismal name Anthony (after Anthony of Padua), which led to her nickname, Toni.[12] Attending Lorain High School, she was on the debate team, the yearbook staff, and in the drama club.[5]
Career[edit]
Adulthood, Howard and Cornell years, and editing career: 1949–1975[edit]
In 1949, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., seeking the company of fellow black intellectuals.[13] Initially a student in the drama program at Howard, she studied theatre with celebrated drama teachers Anne Cooke Reid and Owen Dodson.[14] It was while at Howard that she encountered racially segregated restaurants and buses for the first time.[6] She graduated in 1953 with a B.A. in English and went on to earn a Master of Arts degree in 1955 from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.[15] Her master's thesis was titled "Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's treatment of the alienated".[16] She taught English, first at Texas Southern University in Houston from 1955 to 1957, and then at Howard University for the next seven years. While teaching at Howard, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. Their first son was born in 1961 and she was pregnant with their second son when she and Harold divorced in 1964.[9][17][18]
After her divorce and the birth of her son Slade in 1965, Morrison began working as an editor for L. W. Singer, a textbook division of publisher Random House,[5] in Syracuse, New York. Two years later, she transferred to Random House in New York City, where she became their first black woman senior editor in the fiction department.[19][20]
In that capacity, Morrison played a vital role in bringing Black literature into the mainstream. One of the first books she worked on was the groundbreaking Contemporary African Literature (1972), a collection that included work by Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and South African playwright Athol Fugard.[5] She fostered a new generation of Afro-American writers,[5] including poet and novelist Toni Cade Bambara, radical activist Angela Davis, Black Panther Huey Newton[21] and novelist Gayl Jones, whose writing Morrison discovered. She also brought to publication the 1975 autobiography of the outspoken boxing champion Muhammad Ali, The Greatest: My Own Story. In addition, she published and promoted the work of Henry Dumas,[22] a little-known novelist and poet who in 1968 had been shot to death by a transit officer in the New York City Subway.[6][23]
Among other books that Morrison developed and edited is The Black Book (1974), an anthology of photographs, illustrations, essays, and documents of Black life in the United States from the time of slavery to the 1920s.[6] Random House had been uncertain about the project but its publication met with a good reception. Alvin Beam reviewed the anthology for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, writing: "Editors, like novelists, have brain children – books they think up and bring to life without putting their own names on the title page. Mrs. Morrison has one of these in the stores now, and magazines and newsletters in the publishing trade are ecstatic, saying it will go like hotcakes."[5]
First writings and teaching, 1970–1986[edit]
Morrison had begun writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard University who met to discuss their work. She attended one meeting with a short story about a Black girl who longed to have blue eyes. Morrison later developed the story as her first novel, The Bluest Eye, getting up every morning at 4 am to write, while raising two children on her own.[17]
Documentary films[edit]
Morrison was interviewed by Margaret Busby in London for a 1988 documentary film by Sindamani Bridglal, entitled Identifiable Qualities, shown on Channel 4.[129][130]
Morrison was the subject of a film titled Imagine – Toni Morrison Remembers, directed by Jill Nicholls and shown on BBC One television on July 15, 2015, in which Morrison talked to Alan Yentob about her life and work.[131][132][133]
In 2016, Oberlin College received a grant to complete a documentary film begun in 2014, The Foreigner's Home, about Morrison's intellectual and artistic vision,[134] explored in the context of the 2006 exhibition she guest-curated at the Louvre.[135][136] The film's executive producer was Jonathan Demme.[137] It was directed by Oberlin College Cinema Studies faculty Geoff Pingree and Rian Brown,[138] and incorporates footage shot by Morrison's first-born son Harold Ford Morrison, who also consulted on the film.[139]
In 2019, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.[140] Those featured in the film include Morrison, Angela Davis, Oprah Winfrey, Sonia Sanchez, and Walter Mosley, among others.[141]
