Morrison, Toni (1931–)

Toni Morrison is one of the most lauded and recognized writers in the English language. An accomplished novelist, essayist, playwright, and librettist, Morrison's work is distinguished by her stunningly beautiful use of language and her chronicling of the African American experience through folklore, gender issues, and the human condition. Her illustrious contributions to American letters have earned her numerous honors and have located her among the very best in the field of literature and great thinkers.

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison's infatuation with reading began during childhood. She engrossed herself in the classic novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Gustave Flaubert, and Jane Austen. These works, in their discussion of rigid caste systems, social order, and manners were reminiscent of the oppression experienced by African Americans and spoke to the young Morrison, who admired their prose. A superb student, this love of words followed her to the historically black Howard University, where she majored in English and minored in classics, joining the ranks of such pioneering thinkers and activists as Alain Locke, Sterling A. Brown, Thurgood Marshall, and Ossie Davis. It is at Howard that she challenged the conventional thinking in academia at the time that writing by black authors and issues imperative to the black community were not the basis for serious scholarship. After graduating from Howard in 1953, she took that fight on to Cornell University, pursuing a master's degree in English. She graduated from Cornell in 1955, writing her thesis on the subject of suicide in the novels of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.

After completing her graduate work, Morrison accepted a position at Texas Southern University in Houston and immersed herself in an environment that celebrated the study and culture of black people. In 1957, during the growing turbulence of the civil rights movement, Morrison returned to Howard University as an English instructor and in the process managed to [Page 976]influence some of the greatest minds in American culture. Her classes were attended by the likes of Stokely Carmichael, who went on to become one of the most dynamic leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the black power movement, and Claude Brown, author of the bestselling coming-of-age classic Manchild in the Promised Land. While teaching at Howard, she met and married Jamaican architect Harold Morrison. To this union two sons were born, Harold Ford in 1961 and Slade Kevin in 1964. The marriage would end in divorce soon after the birth of her youngest child, and about its dissolution she would forever exercise her prerogative for silence.

Morrison would soon after trade her teaching career for opportunities in the publishing industry, working first as an editor for a textbook division of Random House and then as an editor for their more commercial publications. During her tenure as the latter, she championed a significant number of black writers and publications. She published works by Muhammad Ali and such well-known political figures as Angela Davis, Huey Newton, and Andrew Young. She also shepherded to publication novels by black women writers like Gayl Jones and Toni Cade Bambara, voices that surely would have gone unheard without her stalwart dedication to their talent. She is also responsible for editing a collection of photographs and newspaper clippings representing the black experience titled The Black Book.

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