Author Bio
• Aka—Chloe Anthony Wofford
• Birth— February 18, 1931
• Where—Lorain, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Howard University; M.A., Cornell University
• Awards—Nobel Prize, 1993, National Book Critics' Circle Award, 1977; Pulitzer Prize, 1988.
• Currently—lives in Princeton, NJ and New York, NY
Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford) is an American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known works are The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved.
Early life and career
Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah (nee Willis) and George Wofford. She was the second of four children in a working-class family. Her parents moved to Ohio to escape southern racism and instilled a sense of heritage through telling traditional African American folktales.
Morrison read frequently as a child; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. According to a 2012 interview in The Guardian, she became a Catholic at the age of 12 and received the baptismal name "Anthony," which later became the basis for her nickname "Toni."
In 1949 Morrison went to Howard University, graduating in 1953 with a B.A. in English; she went on to earn a Master of Arts from Cornell University in 1955. She taught English, first at Texas Southern University in Houston for two years, then at Howard for seven years.
At Howard, she met Jamaican architect Harold Morrison, whom she married in 1958. The couple had two children and divorced in 1964. After the break up of her marriage, she worked as an editor, first in Syracuse and later in New York City where she worked for a textbook publisher as a senior editor.
Morrison later went to work as an editor for Random House. That position enabled her to play a vital role in bringing black literature into the mainstream, working with authors such as Henry Dumas, Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Gayl Jones.
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 attended one meeting with a short story about a black girl who longed to have blue eyes. She later developed the story into her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970)—writing it while raising two children and teaching at Howard. (Years later, in 2000, the book became a selection for Oprah's Book Club.)
Her novel Sula (1973) was nominated for the 1975 National Book Award. However, it was her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977) that 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 and popular success. When the novel failed to win the National Book Award as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, 48 black critics and writers protested the omission. Shortly afterward, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the American Book Award. That same year, Morrison took a visiting professorship at Bard College.
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 the libretto for a new 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 25 years.
In addition to her novels, Morrison has written books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison, who worked as a painter and musician. Slade died of pancreatic cancer in 2010 at the age of 45. Morrison's novel Home, half-written when Slade died, is dedicated to him.
Her 11th novel, entitled God Help the Child, was published in 2015. It is the first of her novels to be set in contemporary time.
Relationship to feminism
Although her novels typically concentrate on black women, Morrison does not identify her works as feminist. When asked in a 1998 interview "Why distance oneself from feminism?" she replied:
In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book—leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity.
She went on to state that she thought it 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.
Critics, however, have referred to her body of work as exemplifying characteristics of "postmodern feminism" by "altering Euro-American dichotomies by rewriting a history written by mainstream historians" and by her usage of shifting narration in Beloved and Paradise.
Later life
Morrison taught English at two branches of the State University of New York and at Rutgers University: New Brunswick Campus. 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 at Princeton, 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.
Honors
At its 1979 commencement ceremonies, Barnard College awarded her its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction.
She won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved
In 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her citation reads: Toni Morrison,who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." Morrison is currently the last American to have been awarded the honor.
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. Morrison's lecture, entitled "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations," began with the aphorism, "Time, it seems, has no future." She cautioned against the misuse of history to diminish expectations of the future.
That same year, 1996, Morrison was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The medal is awarded to a writer "who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work."
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."
Also that year, the New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best novel of the past 25 years.
She continued to explore new art forms, writing the libretto for Margaret Garner, an American opera that explores the tragedy of slavery through the true life story of one woman's experiences. The opera debuted at the New York City Opera in 2007.
In May, 2010, Morrison appeared at PEN World Voices for a conversation with Marlene van Niekerk and Kwame Anthony Appiah about South African literature, and specifically, van Niekerk's novel Agaat.
In May, 2011, Morrison received an Honorable Doctor of Letters Degree from Rutgers University during commencement where she delivered a speech of the "pursuit of life, liberty, meaningfulness, integrity, and truth."
In March, 2012, Morrison established a residency at Oberlin College.In addition to Home, Morrison also debuted another work in 2012: She worked with opera director Peter Sellars and songwriter Rokia Traoré on a new production inspired by William Shakespeare's Othello. The trio focused on the relationship between Othello's wife Desdemona and her African nurse, Barbary, in Desdemona, which premiered in London in the summer of 2012.
Also, in 2012, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Morrison serves as a member of the editorial board of The Nation magazine.
Papers
Morrison's papers are part of the permanent library collections of Princeton University.
Her decision to add her papers to Princeton rather than Howard University, her alma mater, was met with criticism from the Historical Black College and University community. Vice-President of Content with HBCU Buzz Inc., Robert K. Hoggard wrote in his article "Toni Morrison's Papers Will Go to Princeton? Not Howard":
For far too long, White America has found a way to miss-tell our story. Because of this, it’s more important now than ever to unapologetically support our own Black institutions.... Public White institutions do not need our support, they will thrive without. If we are courageous enough to support our own institutions the sky is the limit for what they can continue to do across America.
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/6/2015.)