By: BHS Features Staff
March 22, 2023
Toni Morrison is one of the world’s best and most celebrated authors. She has written everything from children’s plays to award-winning novels. Her work has inspired a generation of female writers to follow in her footsteps.
Morrison was born on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, the second of four children. Although she grew up in a semi-integrated area, racial discrimination was a constant threat, but this did not deter her from chasing her dreams. She turned her fears into something she could use for good, reading and writing. Morrison turned her attention to her studies and became an avid reader, which ultimately led to a future in writing.
She graduated from Lorain High School in 1948. After high school, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington D.C. There, she graduated in 1953 with a Bachelor’s degree in English and went on to later earn a Master of Arts from Cornell University in 1955.
After Cornell, she received her first job at Texas Southern University teaching English from 1955-1957. She then went on to teach English at Howard University for the next seven years. While teaching at Howard, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, who she later married in 1958.
Their first son was born in 1961, and she was pregnant with their second son in 1964. After the birth of her son Slade in 1965, Morrison began working as an editor for L.W. Singer, a textbook division of Random House in Syracuse, New York. Two years later, she transferred to Random House in New York City, where she became their first black woman and senior editor in the fiction department.
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). It was not until she was 39-years-old when she wrote and published her very own book, The Bluest Eye. Three years later, Morrison published her second novel Sula, which was nominated for a National Book Award.
In 1993, Morrison became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Three years later, she was also chosen by the National Endowment for the Humanities to give the Jefferson Lecture and was honored with the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2000, she was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress. She also wrote children’s books with her son until his death at 45-years-old. Two years later, Morrison published the last book they were working on together and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in that same month.
In June of 2019, director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders released a documentary titled “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am”. Morrison passed away two months later from complications with pneumonia.
Toni Morrison’s work continued to influence writers and artists, especially women and people of color at the time, to continue to follow their dreams in reading and in writing. She will forever be remembered as an inspiration.
{Information for this article can be located at Womenshistory.org.}
THE RETURN OF THE EYE 