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Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in
Lorain, Ohio in 1931. The second oldest of four
children in a working class family, Morrison's childhood was
marked by financial difficulties and the constant presence
of racial attitudes regarding the black experience in
America. Throughout her childhood, Morrison's parents
worked numerous jobs to provide for the family.
Education, coupled with racial and self-awareness, were
dominant ideologies in the Wofford home. Both
Morrison's mother and father adhered to staunch attitudes
concerning white Americans. While her mother believed
in the possibility for change in racist attitudes and
behavior, her father remained steadfast in his beliefs that
whites would never be trustworthy individuals due to their
thoughts and actions towards blacks. Despite these
strict views of white Americans, the Woffords were more
intense regarding the humanity of African Americans and the
importance of maintaining one's self-respect and
dignity. In addition to these attitudes the Woffords
also exhibited a respect for education, and the importance
of culturally grounded pastime activities.
Speaking of her family, Morrison has
often noted the continuous presence and performance of music
and storytelling in her parents' household.
Storytelling was especially instrumental in her early
creative development as she and her siblings were encouraged
to participate in the process. Hence, orality and
performance were instilled in Morrison at an early
age. Moreover, she was encouraged to read literature
and found new worlds revealed to her as a result.
Morrison's undergraduate education was
completed at Howard University Washington, D. C., where
she majored in English Literature. In addition to her
academic area, she participated in the performance group, Howard University Players, a traveling performance
group,
which enabled her to visit parts of the South. It was
during her undergraduate years that she formally changed her
name to Toni.
In 1953, Morrison completed her
undergraduate degree and enrolled at Cornell University to
continue her studies at the graduate level. In
completing the requirements for the master's degree,
Morrison wrote her thesis on the subject of "suicide" as
depicted in the words of William Faulkner and Virginia
Woolf. Following receipt of her degree in 1955, she
accepted a teaching position at Texas Southern
University. In 1957, she returned to Howard
University, her alma mater, as an instructor in the English
Department. She remained at Howard for the next seven
years. In 1964, she left Howard and briefly returned
to Ohio. She eventually accepted a position with
Random House as an editor, and worked with such notable
African American authors as Gayle Jones and the late Toni
Cade Bambara.
Morrison's illustrious career as an
author began with the publication of her first novel
The Bluest Eye in 1970. She had begun working on the
manuscript in the mid-1960s following the break-up of her
marriage to Harold Morrison. She followed up this
critically acclaimed novel with Sula (1973), and
Song of Solomon (1978). Since then, her writing has
included the novels Tar Baby
(1981), the Pulitzer Prize
winning novel Beloved (1987),
Jazz
(1992), and Paradise (1997).
In addition to her fiction, Morrison has published numerous
critical essays and the non-fiction work Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the
Literary Imagination (1992). She has served as editor for such
collections as The Black Book
(1974), Race-ing, Justice, En-gendering Power:
Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Construction
of Social Reality (1992), and
Birth of a Nation 'Hood:
Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson
Case [in collaboration with
Claudia Brodsky Lacour] (1997).
In recognition of her achievements and
contributions in literature, Morrison was awarded the 1993
Nobel Prize. To date, she is the first and only
African American to receive this honor. Her acceptance
speech, in which Morrison acknowledges the multitude of
influences on her work, is also in publication.
Since 1988, Morrison has held the Robert
F.Goheen Professorship of the Humanities at Princeton
University.
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