Toni Morrison Biography
Toni Morrison was born named Chloe Anthony Wofford, on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio. She was the daughter of Ramah and George Wofford. When Morrison entered the first grade, she was the only black student in her class and also the only child who had already learned to read. She eventually graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a degree in English, and later earned a master's degree from Cornell. Friends at college started calling her Toni because of her middle name.
Morrison returned to Howard University to teach English in 1957, after two years of teaching at (TSU) Texas Southern University. While teaching at Howard she met and married a Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison. Together they had two sons, Harold Ford and Slade Kevin. In the following years she joined a writer's group in which she wrote a short story about a little black girl who wanted blue eyes. She eventually developed that story into her first novel, The Bluest Eye.
In 1964, Toni and Harold Morrison divorced, and Toni moved to New York with her two young sons. She began working as a book editor at Random House in 1965. Over the next 20 years, Morrison moved into a senior editorial position with the company and shepherded the literary efforts of a number of prominent African-Americans, including Muhammad Ali, Angela Davis, Andrew Young, and Toni Cade Bambara (Morrison).
Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye was published in 1970 but did not seem to sell well. She had more marketable success with her second novel, Sula in 1973, the story of a close friendship between two women in a Midwestern black community called "The Bottom." With her next novel, Song of Solomon in 1977, Morrison switched her viewpoint towards the African-American man, named Milkman Dead, who takes a journey south from his hometown in Ohio to learn more about his family history. It became a paperback bestseller and won the National Book Critics' Circle Award for fiction.
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