In celebration of Black History Month, I am honored to feature Toni Morrison’s birthday as our February author’s birthday.
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio on February 18, 1931.
She passed away August 5, 2019, after a brief illness. She was an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, parent, and professor emeritus at Princeton University.
During her 88 years on this Earth, she faced adversity with dignity, grace and humor and became one of the most respected American novelists of the 20th and 21st centuries.
When Ms. Morrison was about two years old, her family's landlord set fire to the house they rented because her parents could not pay the rent. The family was inside the home and could have been killed. Instead of retaliating, her parents responded to his heinous disregard for life by laughing at his stupidity for attempting to destroy his own property instead of evicting them or allowing the family a few extra days to pay the rent.
Ms. Morrison credited her parents with sharing their heritage and giving her a love of language by telling traditional African American folktales and ghost stories and filling their home with music. She developed a great love for reading as a child. This helped shape her career path and continued throughout her adult life. Her favorite authors included Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy.
She converted to Catholicism at the age of 12 and selected “Anthony’ for her baptismal name after Anthony of Padua. This led to her nickname, Toni.
Ms. Morrison graduated from Howard University and attended graduate school at Cornell University. Her master's thesis was titled "Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's treatment of the alienated.” After graduation, she taught English at Texas Southern University in Houston and later at Howard University where she met her husband. They divorced shortly before their second son’s birth.
The following year, she became an editor at L. W. Singer, a textbook division of publisher Random House in Syracuse, New York and later transferred to Random House in New York City. She became their first black woman senior editor in the fiction department and helped bring black literature into the mainstream.
Ms. Morrison began writing in her spare time. She often got up at 4am to write before getting her sons off to school and going to work. Her first novel was originally a short story about a young black girl who wished for blue eyes. She had written it for an informal group of poets and authors at Howard University who met to discuss their work. Her completed work, The Bluest Eye was published in 1970. Though the book was well liked by critics, sales remained modest until several universities added the book to their black studies required reading lists. Sula was her follow up novel.
Song of Solomon (1977) received national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She left publishing in 1983 to concentrate on her work and she went back to teaching English at two branches of the State University of New York (SUNY) and at Rutgers University's New Brunswick campus.
In 1988, Ms. Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for Beloved.
In 1993, she became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature.
After receiving her Nobel Prize, Ms. Morrison stated:
“Nobody was going to take that and make it into something else. I felt representational. I felt American. I felt Ohioan. I felt blacker than ever. I felt more woman than ever. I felt all of that, and put all of that together and went out and had a good time.”
In 1996, Oprah Winfrey selected Song of Solomon for her newly launched Book Club, which became a popular feature on her show. She selected a total of four of Ms. Morrison's novels in a six-year period.
In 1998, Ms. Morrison earned the distinction of becoming only the second female writer of fiction and second black writer of fiction to appear on Time magazine.
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional, Ms. Morrison put together a children's book called Remember.
Ms. Morrison was presented with a Presidential Medal of Freedom, our nation’s highest civilian honor, by President Barack Obama on May 29, 2012, at the White House.
Ms. Morrison wrote about racism, the differences between Black and White culture, the experiences of black people in their own communities and how they interacted with each other. She was often asked why she never wrote stories with white main characters. Her work was critically acclaimed, but also heavily challenged and often banned in the South. She was a staunch opponent of censorship and fought to improve writing opportunities for people of color. According to Ms. Morrison,
“The same sensibilities that informed those people to make it a criminal act for black people to read are the ancestors of the same people who are making it a criminal act for their own children to read.”
The recently opened National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, includes writing by Morrison. Visitors can see her quote after they have walked through the section commemorating individual victims of lynching.
Ms. Morrison will be remembered as one of the greatest American novelists of her generation for her novels, short stories and non-fiction works. She will also be remembered as a mother, educator, historian, and advocate for people of color, especially women of color.
Works by Toni Morrison:
Novels:
The Bluest Eye (1990)
Sula (1973)
Song of Solomon (1977)
Tar Baby (1981)
Beloved (1987)
Jazz (1992)
Paradise (1997)
Love (2003)
A Mercy (2008)
Home (2012)
God Help the Child (2015)
Children's literature (with Slade Morrison):
The Big Box (1999)
The Book of Mean People (2002)
Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse?, Poppy or the Snake? (2007)
Peeny Butter Fudge (2009)
Please, Louise (2014)
Short fiction:
"Recitatif" (1983)
"Sweetness" (2015)
Plays:
Dreaming Emmett (performed 1986)
Desdemona (first performed May 15, 2011, in Vienna)
Libretto:
Margaret Garner (first performed May 2005)
Sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison
https://pen.org/multimedia/toni-morrison-on-censorship-literacy-and-literature/
Photo credit:
Quote from Toni Morrison on a wall as part of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The memorial, which covers a city block in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, commemorates over four thousand lives lost to racial lynchings. It was organized by the Equal Justice Initiative and opened in 2018. 4 March 2019, 11:28. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, Alabama Carwil Bjork-James from Nashville, TN, USA. Accessed 8/31/19.
All other photos are in the public domain.