Toni Morrison Research Paper

Toni Morrison, born Chloe Anthony Wofford, is an American novelist, editor, literary critic, and professor. Before her birth, her parents, George and Ramah Wofford, moved to the North to escape the problems of southern racism. Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio as the second of four children. Spending her childhood in the Midwest, she read eagerly from the works of Jane Austen to Tolstoy. Morrison's father was a welder who told her folktales of the black community, transferring his African-American heritage to her, which she transferred to her writings later on. She grew up in an integrated neighborhood but her parents ensured that she was aware of racism and its effects by the time she was a teenager (Leondis).

Morrison graduated from Lorain

High School in 1949 and attended Howard University, the most distinguished black college at the time, and received a Bachelor of Arts in English. After graduating in 1953, she went on to study at Cornell University and wrote her thesis on the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, finishing her master's degree in 1955. After completing her education, Morrison taught English at Texas Southern University until 1957 when she returned to Howard University to teach English (A&E Television Networks).
During her time as a professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Morrison met her husband Harold Morrison, an architect originally from Jamaica. The couple got married in 1958 and had their first child in 1961. In 1964, Morrison, pregnant with her second child, divorced Harold. Harold moved back to Jamaica and Morrison moved to Syracuse, New York with her sons, where she began writing her first novel, The Bluest Eye (Brockes). She worked for a publishing company called Random House, where she was initially an editor in the textbook division and later, after moving to an office in Manhattan, a fiction editor. She edited works by such authors as Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones (A&E Television Networks).
Morrison published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970.

It recounts the story of an abused young African-American girl who believes that her hardships in life would be better if she had blue eyes and met the criteria defined by white aesthetic ideals of physical attractiveness. She wrote many more books centered around issues with race and gender. One of the reasons she is so important is her refusal to conform to the storytelling norms of having white male protagonists. Her town in Ohio was home to many Southern migrants, like her parents, as well as European immigrants. Her awareness of culture outside of the American white patriarchal norm greatly informed her inspired fiction. Most of her works revolve around black women defining their roles and striving to survive in a male dominated society (Frost). All of her characters were black, making her a key figure for black readers. Susan R. Bowers describes her significance, “Morrison’s most revolutionary and most defining act was writing for black readers about black people. This singular and courageous act challenged white hegemony and simultaneously credited the complexity and originality of African American life by working within its intricate and real system of meaning, language, and

art.”
From a young age, it was clear Morrison had talent. She was one of the brightest students in her grade school and graduated high school with multiple honors. Although she did not view writing as her future career, she was an avid reader, which built the foundations for her later work. Morrison was sincerely interested in the roots of racism and how to overcome it and, through her writing, became an activist. In an interview she said, “It is not possible for me to be unaware of the incredible violence, the willful ignorance, the hunger for other people’s pain. I’m always conscious of that. Teaching makes a big difference, but that is not enough. Teaching could make me into someone who is complacent, unaware, rather than part of the solution. So what makes me feel as though I belong here out in this world is not the teacher, not the mother, not the lover, but what goes on in my mind when I am writing. Then I belong here and then all of the things that are disparate and irreconcilable can be useful. I can do the traditional things that writers always say they do, which is to make order out of chaos. Even if you are reproducing the disorder, you are sovereign at that point.” In that same interview, when asked why she chose to become a writer rather than a politician or public speaker to make change on issues she is passionate about, she responded, “I would have if I had a gift for it. All I can do is read books and write books and edit books and critique books. I don’t think that I could show up on a regular basis as a politician. I would lose interest. I don’t have the resources for it, the gift. There are people who can organize other people and I cannot. I’d just get bored” (Schappell).
Morrison became a professor at Princeton University in 1989, and continued to produce great works. In recognition of her contributions to her field, she received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first African American woman to be selected for the award (Leondis). Morrison has won almost every book prize possible, including the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize, and has been awarded numerous honorary degrees. In 1975, Sula was awarded the Ohioana Book Award and nominated for the National Book Award. Song of Solomon was the first work by an African American author to be a featured selection in the book-of-the-month club since Native Son by Richard Wright. In addition, Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1977. Morrison was appointed to the National Council on the Arts in 1980 and, 7 years later, published one of her most famous works, Beloved. Morrison won several literary awards for Beloved, including the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Award from National Organization for Women, the Washington College Literary Award, and the New York State Governor's Arts Award. In 1998, a movie starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover was created based on the novel