Thematic Evaluation

Background Information

Beloved Discussion Forum

Annotated Bibliography

Other Interesting Links

Also in Toni Morrison Uncensored Morrison says, "Racism is taught; it is a scholarly affair.  Encyclopedias are full of outrageous claims of whiteness or blackness." 

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardellia on February 18, 1931, the daughter of George and Ramah Wofford.  She grew up in Lorain, Ohio, a small steel-mill town on Lake Erie.  Eberhard Alsen writes, "The population of Lorain consisted largely of European immigrants, and schools were not segregated.  In fact, when Morrison started grade school, she was the only black child in her class and the only one who could already read" (331).  

In Lorain, Morrison experienced racism.  Alsen explains, "Even the children of newly arrived immigrants who could not speak English were immediately taught that they and their families were not at the bottom of American society but that blacks were below them" (331).  It is because of this prevalent attitude that Morrison's father taught her contempt for white people.

Racism, however, did not hold Morrison back.  She earned her BA in English from Howard University, 1953, and then entered the Graduate program at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.  Her master's thesis was titled, "Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's Treatment of the Alienated" (332).

Morrison was married and had two sons, Harold and Slade.  She taught at Texas Southern University and then Howard University.  Her marriage did not survive and the time after her divorce was difficult.  After living with her mother she got a job working in Syracuse, New York, as a textbook editor for L.W. Singer, a subsidiary of Random House.  It was then that she decided to develop a short story she'd written at Howard University, which became The Bluest Eye and was published in 1970.

After being promoted to senior editor for Random House, Morrison moved to New York City.  Sula was published in 1973, and in 1974 Morrison edited The Black Book, a historical record of Black America.  This book was influential in Morrison's life and works.

She continued writing.  Her works include Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998).  According to Alsen, "A major theme in the novel [Beloved] is the history of the treatment that black female slaves have received from whites ever since they were packed onto the slaveships that brought them to America" (338).

The success of Sula earned Morrison an appointment as lecturer at Yale University.  She won the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Song of Solomon.  President Carter appointed her to the National Council of Arts in 1980, "and in 1981 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters" (Alsen 333).

In 1984, Morrison quit Random House in order to devote herself full-time to writing.  Also in 1984 she was appointed to the Albert Schweitzer Professorship of the Humanities at the State University of New York in Albany.  She received the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved, and "In 1992 she published three of her Harvard lectures under the title, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination" (Alsen 333).

In 1993 Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.  She was the first black person to be awarded this prize and only the eighth woman.  Alsen writes, "The majority of all printed reviews of Morrison's work are favorable.  However, there have always been critics whose stylistic or political sensibilities have been offended by Morrison's fiction" (334).