Toni Morrison's Complete Bookshelf
With Reviews and Reader Comments Here

Toni Morrison went from cleaning houses for rich, white families to being the first African American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her dramatic themes, which realistically depict the history and plight of black Americans have won her international respect as a writer, cultural leader, and intellectual.

Morrison, the daughter of a welder, was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in a small, middle-class neighborhood in northern Ohio. In 1953, she graduated from Howard University with a degree in literature and continued at Cornell University, where she received a master's degree in English in 1955. While at school, she met and later married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect. Though the marriage ended in divorce, they had two sons, Harold Ford Morrison and Slade Kevin Morrison.

After a brief teaching stint at Howard University, Morrison began editing for Random House Publishing in Syracuse, New York. In 1967, she was promoted to senior editor and moved to New York City. During this time, she finished work on her first novel, The Bluest Eye, a story of two very different black families, one modeled directly after her own. Morrison continued to write novels and won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1977 for Song of Solomon. This book was brought back to the forefront of hot literature in 1997 by Oprah Winfrey's book club.

Morrison's success continued to snowball. In 1980, Tar Baby was published and President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Beloved (1987), which describes how a former slave grapples with the past, won Morrison the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1988 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. When accepting the Nobel Prize in Stockholm for this unprecedented achievement, she gave an extraordinary speech that has been compared to William Faulkner's 1949 Nobel acceptance speech: "We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."

Morrison has also taught at several leading universities including Yale, Harvard, Cambridge, and Princeton. She continues to work at Random House editing the work of authors such as Toni Cade Bambara and Gayle Jones.

AWARDS
Nobel Prize for Literature, (1993)
Robert F. Kennedy Award, (1988)
Pulitzer Prize for fiction, (1988)
Washington College Literary Award, (1987)
New York State Governor's Arts Award, (1986)
American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, (1977)
National Book Critics Circle Award, (1977)
Ohioana Book Award, (1975)
National Book Award nomination, (1975)

Toni Morrison's Complete BOOKSHELF Here

Paradise (1998)
Jazz (1992)
Beloved (1987)
Tar Baby (1981)
Song of Solomon (1977)
Sula (1973)
The Bluest Eye (1970)

Toni Morrison's Complete BOOKSHELF Here

 

 

 

 

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