Morrison, Toni

views updated

Morrison, Toni

February 18, 1931

By the 1980s Toni Morrison was considered by the literary world to be a major American novelist. In 1992—five years after she received the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved and the year of publication both for her sixth novel, Jazz, and for a series of lectures on American literature, Playing in the Dark —Morrison was being referred to internationally as one of the greatest American writers of all time. In 1993 she became the first black woman in history to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The road to prominence began with Morrison's birth into a family she describes as a group of storytellers. Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, she was the second of four children of George Wofford (a steel-mill welder, car washer, and construction and shipyard worker) and Ramah Willis Wofford (who worked at home and sang in church).

Her grandparents came to the North from Alabama to escape poverty and racism. Her father's and mother's experiences with and responses to racial violence and economic inequality, as well as what Morrison learned about living in an economically cooperative neighborhood, influenced the political edge of her art. Her early understanding of the "recognized and verifiable principles of Black art," principles she heard demonstrated in her family's stories and saw demonstrated in the art and play of black people around her, also had its effect. Morrison's ability to manipulate the linguistic qualities of both black art and conventional literary form manifests itself in a prose that some critics have described as lyrical and vernacular at the same time.

After earning a B.A. from Howard University in 1953, Morrison moved to Cornell University for graduate work in English and received an M.A. in 1955. She taught at Texas Southern University from 1955 to 1957 and then at Howard University until 1964, where she met and married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, and gave birth to two sons. Those were years that Morrison described as a period of almost complete powerlessness, when she wrote quietly and participated in a writers' workshop, creating the story that would become The Bluest Eye.

In 1964 Morrison divorced her husband and moved to Syracuse, New York, where she began work for Random House. She later moved to a senior editor's position at the Random House headquarters in New York City—continuing to teach, along the way, at various universities. Since 1988 she has been Robert F. Goheen Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.

Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), is a text that combines formal "play" between literary aesthetics and pastoral imagery with criticism of the effects of racialized personal aesthetics. Sula (1973) takes the pattern of the heroic quest and the artist-outsider theme and disrupts both in a novel that juxtaposes those figurations with societal gender restrictions amid the historical constraint of racism. Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987) are engagements with the relation to history of culturally specific political dynamics, aesthetics, and ritualized cultural practices.

Song of Solomon sets group history within the parameters of a family romance; Tar Baby interweaves the effects of colonialism and multiple family interrelationships that are stand-ins for history with surreal descriptions of landscape; and Beloved negotiates narrative battles over story and history produced as a result of the imagination's inability to make sense of slavery. In Jazz, Morrison continued her engagement with the problems and productiveness of individual storytelling's relation to larger, public history.

The lectures published as Playing in the Dark continue Morrison's interest in history and narrative. The collection abstracts her ongoing dialogue with literary criticism and history around manifestations of race and racism as narrative forms themselves produced by (and producers of) the social effects of racism in the larger public imagination.

Morrison's work sets its own unique imprimatur on that public imagination as much as it does on the literary world. A consensus has emerged that articulates the importance of Morrison to the world of letters and demonstrates the permeability of the boundary between specific cultural production—the cultural production that comes out of living as part of the African-American group—and the realm of cultural production that critics perceive as having crossed boundaries between groups and nationstates.

Morrison's ability to cross the boundaries as cultural commentator is reflected in Race-ing Justice and Engendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, a collection of essays about the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the accusations of sexual harassment brought against him by law professor Anita Hill. The essays in the collection were written by scholars from various fields, then edited and introduced by Morrison. At the same time, she wrote poetry and lyrics for the song cycles "Dare Degga" and "Honey and Rue."

Morrison's reputation was confirmed in 1998 by the critical success of her novel Paradise. That year, with aid from entertainer Oprah Winfrey, her work also reached a new, wider public. After an endorsement from Winfrey's "Oprah's Book Club," sales of Paradise climbed into bestseller range. The same year, Winfrey produced and starred in a film adaptation of Morrison's novel Beloved.

Morrison's eighth novel, Love, was published in 2003 to high praise from critics. The following year, she also released a book for young people telling the story of school integration.

See also Literary Criticism, U.S.; Literature