An Introduction to the African American Writer Toni Morrison

Originally named Chloe Anthony Wofford, Morrison was born on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio to working class parents Ramah and George Wofford. At a young age, Morrison evinced a strong interest in literature largely due to her obvious apetite for reading and to the influence of the black community in which she grew up in. Her father was especially influential, exposing the young Morrison to the folklore of their people.

After high school, Morrison decided to pursue in part her great interest in the literary arts when she took up humanities at Howard University. She later earned a degree in English and later pursued a master's degree at Cornell University.

Parallel to her career as a writer, Morrison also simultaneously pursued a career in education, occupying various important academic positions, first as an English instructor at Texas Southern University and then later at Howard University. She also taught at the State University of New York and later received from the University of Albany an appointment for an Albert Schweitzer chair. From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, she was a humanities professor at Princeton University and the Chair of the Creative Writing Program in the same university .

It was back in Howard however, that Morrison encountered a turning point in her life when she met, married and eventually divorced Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison. After the divorce in 1964, Morrison took her two children Slade Kevin and Harold Ford with her to Syracuse, New York where she worked first as a textbook editor and then later as an editor for Random House.

As a writer, Morrison has often been regarded as the premier promoter of African American Literature. Her great success at relaying the dramatic import of her work has been primarily obviously due to her writing about realities that are very much close to home. Morrison has also been largely praised for the sheer epic scope of her stories, the apparent importance she gives to clarity of dialogue and the meaningfully charged accounts of genuine Black culture and life as only an involved African American can comprehend and tell.

Morrison has also been praised for her unique writing style in which she apparently shuns the traditional chronological order of story telling in her important works and utilizing instead split narratives and interspersing the past, present and future events in the telling of her stories. This does not mean however, that Morrison does not make any sense. On the contrary, her style has been much applauded precisely because her stories remain unified and cohesive despite her unusual style.

After facing the rejection of her work, her first novel, The Bluest Eye finally saw print in 1970. It was followed by Sula in 1973, Song of Solomon in 1977, Tar Baby in 1981, Beloved in 1987, Jazz in 1992, Paradise in 1998 and Love in 2003.

She received the National Books Critic Circle Award for fiction in 1978 for Song of Solomon and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 for Beloved. The Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to Morrison in 1993, becoming the first black woman to receive such a distinction.