Research on Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was originally born as Chloe Anthony Wofford. She was born in Lorain, Ohio, on February 18, 1931. She was the second of four children by her parents George Wofford and Ramah Willis Wofford. Her parents migrated to the North to escape racism from the South. Her father worked three jobs for seventeen years to support the family. Her mother was an ongoing church woman and sang in the choir. Her mother always sang old songs and tales of Southern black Folklore.
Lorain, Ohio was a very integrated town with Europeans, Mexicans, and Souther black people. Morrison attended an integrated school and was the only black girl in her first grade class who could read. She had many white friends, and she didn't experience discrimination until she started dating. She graduated from Lorain High School with honors in 1949. Her favorite authors were the Russian writers Tolstoy, and Dostoyevski, French author Gustave Flaubert, and English novelist Jane Austen.

Toni Morrison studied humanities at Howard and Cornell Universities. In college she changed her name to Toni because a lot of people couldn't pronounce her name. She joined the Howard University Players, a repertory company, with whom she traveled and did several tours throughout the South. During the tours she saw for herself why her parents escaped the South. She worked as a professor at Texas Southern University, Yale, and Princeton.

After graduating Toni fell in love with Harold Morrison. They ogt married in 1958 and had their first son together in 1961. Toni continued to teach while raising her son, and she also joined a small writing group as an escape from an unhappy married life. Each week everyone in the group was required to bring a short story or a poem to discuss, however, one week Toni Morrison had nothing to bring so she quickly wrote a story about her childhood friend who wanted blue eyes. She put it away for a while thinking she was done with it. While she was pregnant with her second son, she divorced her husband, and moved back to Lorain with her parents.

In 1964 Morrison got a job as an associate editor in Syracuse, New York. While she was at work her sons were being taken care of by the housekeeper, and when she would come home she would cook dinner and play with her sons. She began writing while her sons were sleeping. She started working on the story about her friend that she put away for a few years. She wrote based on her childhood memories while also adding her imagination so that the characters each had a life of their own. She really enjoyed writing and thought everything else was boring in comparison.

In 1967 Morrison was transferred to New York and became a senior editor. While she was editing books by black American authors such as Muhammad Ali, Andrew Young and Angela Davis, she was also sending her own novels to different publishers. Her first novel,The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. Shortly after she began writing her second novel, Sula, which was published in 1973. From 1976-1977 she was visiting a lecturer in New Haven , Connecticut. She was also writing her third novel, Song of Solomon, which she focused on the power of men due to inspiration from her two songs. The novel was published in 1977. Her fourth book, Tar Baby, was published in 1981. In this novel she focused on the relationships between black and white people.
In 1984 Morrison started writing her first play, Dreaming Emmett. It was based on the true story of Emmett Till. The play premiered January 4, 1986 at the Marketplace Theatre in Albany, New York. Morrison's next novel, Beloved, was published in 1987. This novel was influenced by a published story about a slave named Margaret Garner. In 1851 Margaret escaped from Kentucky and moved her children to Ohio. When she was about to be re-captured she tried to kill her children because she didn't want them to live the life she had to live. She only succeeded in killing one of her children, and she was put in prison for doing so. While she was in prison she still had no regrets. In 1988, Beloved, won the Pulitzer prize for fiction.

In 1987, Morrison was named the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the council of Humanities at Princeton University. She was the first African American woman to hold a named chair at an Ivy League University. Morrison taught creative writing and participated in the African-American studies, American studies and women's studies programs. Her next novel, Jazz, was published in 1992. This novel was about life in the 1920's. Toni Morrison received the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature. She was the first African American woman to do so.