Toni Morrison
(born Chloe Ardelia [1] Wofford
on February 18, 1931) is a Nobel Prize-winning American author, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed black characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye
, Song of Solomon
, and Beloved
, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988.
Her work has been performed on stage and in film.
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TONI MORRISON TICKETS
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Early life and career
Toni Morrison was born in
Lorain, Ohio to George and Ramah (Willis) Wofford, the second of four children in a working-class family.
[2] As a child, Morrison read constantly; among her favorite authors were
Jane Austen and
Leo Tolstoy. Morrison's father told her numerous folktales of the black community (a method of storytelling that would later work its way into Morrison's writings).
[3]
In 1949 Morrison entered
Howard University to study English. Morrison received a B.A. in English from Howard in 1953, then earned a
Master of Arts degree, also in English, from
Cornell University in 1955, for which she wrote a
thesis on
suicide in the works of
William Faulkner and
Virginia Woolf . After graduation, Morrison became an English instructor at
Texas Southern University in
Houston, Texas (from 1955-57) then returned to Howard to teach English. She became a member of
Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.
In 1958 she married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect and fellow faculty member at
Howard University. They had two children, Harold and Slade, and divorced in 1964. After the divorce she moved to
Syracuse, New York, where she worked as a textbook editor. A year and a half later she went to work as an editor at the
New York City headquarters of
Random House.
[4]
As an editor, Morrison played an important role in bringing black literature into the mainstream. She edited books by such authors as
Toni Cade Bambara,
Angela Davis and
Gayl Jones.
[5]
Writing career
Morrison began writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard University who met to discuss their work. She went to one meeting with a short story about a black girl who longed to have blue eyes. The story later evolved into her first novel,
The Bluest Eye
(1970), which she wrote while raising two children and teaching at Howard.
In 2000 it was chosen as a selection for
Oprah's Book Club.
[6]
In 1975 her novel
Sula
(1973) was nominated for the
National Book Award. Her third novel,
Song of Solomon
(1977), brought her national attention. The book was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since
Richard Wright's
Native Son
in 1940. It won the
National Book Critics Circle Award.
In 1987 Morrison's novel
Beloved
became a critical success. When the novel failed to win the
National Book Award as well as the
National Book Critics Circle Award, a number of writers protested over the omission.
[7] Shortly afterward, it won the
Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Beloved
was adapted into the 1998
film of the same name starring
Oprah Winfrey and
Danny Glover. Morrison later used
Margaret Garner's life story again in an opera,
Margaret Garner
, with music by
Richard Danielpour. In May 2006,
The New York Times Book Review
named
Beloved
the best
American novel published in the previous twenty-five years.
In 1993 Morrison was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature, the first black woman to win it.
[8] Her citation reads: Toni Morrison, "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." Shortly afterwards, a fire destroyed her Rockland County, New York home.
[9]
In 1996 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.
[10] Morrison's lecture, entitled "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations,"
[11] began with the aphorism, "Time, it seems, has no future," and cautioned against misuse of history to diminish expectations of the future.
[12]
Although her novels typically concentrate on black women, Morrison does not identify her works as
feminist.
[13] She has stated that she thinks "it's off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I'm involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don't subscribe to patriarchy, and I don't think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it's a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things."
In addition to her novels, Morrison has also co-written books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison, who works as a painter and musician.
Later life
Morrison taught English at two branches of the
State University of New York. In 1984 she was appointed to an
Albert Schweitzer chair at the
University at Albany, The State University of New York. From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held the
Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at
Princeton University.
Though based in the Creative Writing Program, Morrison did not regularly offer writing workshops to students after the late 1990s, a fact that earned her some criticism. Rather, she has conceived and developed the prestigious
Princeton Atelier
, a program that brings together talented students with critically acclaimed, world-famous artists. Together the students and the artists produce works of art that are presented to the public after a semester of collaboration. In her position at
Princeton, Morrison used her insights to encourage not merely new and emerging writers, but artists working to develop new forms of art through interdisciplinary play and cooperation.
At its 1979 commencement ceremonies,
Barnard College awarded her its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction.
Oxford University awarded her an
honorary Doctor of Letters degree in June 2005.
In November 2006, Morrison visited the
Louvre Museum in
Paris as the second in its "Grand Invité" program to guest-curate a month-long series of events across the arts on the theme of "The Foreigner's Home." Inspired by her curatorship, Morrison returned to
Princeton in Fall 2008 to lead a small seminar, also entitled "The Foreigner's Home."
She is currently a member of the editorial board of
The Nation
magazine.
Politics
In writing about the
impeachment in 1998, Morrison wrote that, since
Whitewater,
Bill Clinton had been mistreated because of his "blackness":
"ref">[14]
The phrase "our first Black president" was adopted as a positive by
Bill Clinton supporters such as on September 29, 2001, when the
Congressional Black Caucus honored the former president at its Annual Awards Dinner in
Washington D.C., with the chair, Rep.
Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), telling the audience that Clinton "took so many initiatives he made us think for a while we had elected the first black president."
[15].
In the context of the 2008 Democratic Primary campaign, Morrison stated to
Time
magazine: "People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race."
[16] In the
Democratic primary contest for the
2008 presidential race, Morrison endorsed Senator
Barack Obama over Senator
Hillary Rodham Clinton,
[17] though expressing admiration and respect for the latter.
[18]
Works
Novels
- The Bluest Eye
(1970; ISBN 0-452-28706-5)
- Sula
(1974; ISBN 1-4000-3343-8)
- Song of Solomon
(1977; ISBN 1-4000-3342-X)
- Tar Baby
(1981; ISBN 1-4000-3344-6)
- Beloved
(1987; ISBN 1-4000-3341-1)
- Jazz
(1992; ISBN 1-4000-7621-8)
- Paradise
(1999; ISBN 0-679-43374-0)
- Love
(2003; ISBN 0-375-40944-0)
- A Mercy
(2008; ISBN 978-0-307-26423-7)
Children's literature (with Slade Morrison)
- The Big Box
(2002)
- The Book of Mean People
(2002)
Short fiction
Plays
- Dreaming Emmett
(performed 1986)
Libretti
- Margaret Garner
(first performed May 2005)
Non-fiction
- The Black Book
(1974)
- Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
(1992)
- Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality
(editor) (1992)
- Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case
(co-editor) (1997)
- Remember: The Journey to School Integration
(April 2004)
- What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction
, edited by Carolyn C. Denard (April 2008)
Articles
- "Introduction." Mark Twain, _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_. [1885] The Oxford Mark Twain, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. xxxii-xli.
Awards and nominations
Awards
- Nobel Prize for Literature 1993
- Jefferson Lecture 1996
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1988 for "Beloved"
- Anisfield-Wolf Book Award 1988 for "Beloved"
- UUA: (named for an editor of Publishers Weekly), 1988 for "Beloved". in her acceptance speech that “there is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby” honoring the memory of the human beings forced into slavery and brought to the United States. “There’s no small bench by the road,” led the Toni Morrison Society to begin installing benches at significant sites in the history of slavery in America; the first was dedicated July 26, 2008 on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, the point of entry for approximately 40 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to British North America.
- National Book Critics Circle Award 1977 for Song of Solomon
- In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Toni Morrison on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans. [19]
Nominations
- Grammy Awards 2008 Best Spoken Word Album for Children - "Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?"
See also
- American Literature
- African American literature
- Black Nobel Prize laureates
References
- The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness
- CHLOE WOFFORD Talks about TONI MORRISON
- Awaiting Toni Morrison
- Toni Morrison Is '93 Winner Of Nobel Prize in Literature
- Paradise found: a talk with Toni Morrison about her new novel - Nobel Laureate's new book, 'Paradise' - Interview
- "The Bluest Eye" at Oprah's Book Club official page
- All That Glitters - Literature's global economy
- Toni Morrison: Words Of Love
- New York Home of Toni Morrison Burns
- Jefferson Lecturers at NEH Website (retrieved January 22, 2009).
- Toni Morrison, "The Future of Time, Literature and Diminished Expectations," reprinted in Toni Morrison, ''What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction'' (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2008), ISBN 9781604730173, pp.170-186.
- B. Denise Hawkins, "Marvelous Morrison - Toni Morrison - Award-Winning Author Talks About the Future From Some Place in Time," ''Diverse Online'' (formerly ''Black Issues In Higher Education''), Jun 17, 2007.
- The Salon Interview with Toni Morrison
- "Talk of the Town: Comment," ''The New Yorker'', October 1998, accessed August 6, 2008.
- "Congressional Black Caucus," ''CNSNews.com'', October 2001.
- Sachs, Andrea."10 Questions for Toni Morrison", ''Time'', May 7, 2008.
- http://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/29/headlines
- Alexander, Elizabeth."Our first black president?, It's worth remembering the context of Toni Morrison's famous phrase about Bill Clinton, so we can retire it, now that Barack Obama is a contender.", ''Salon.com'', January 28, 2008.
- Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-963-8.