Toni Morrison

American novelist

• Born: February 18, 1931
• Birthplace: Lorain, Ohio
• Died: August 5, 2019
• Deathplace: Bronx, New York

Morrison was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her work displays the dignity and richness of African American culture by chronicling its history and celebrating its uniquely brilliant ethos through the use of language, folk forms, and narrative traditions. Her work includes some of the most engaging contributions to American literature of the twentieth century.

Early Life

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio. She was the second of four children born to George Wofford and Ramah Willis Wofford. Both parents had strong southern roots. Morrison’s father was from Georgia and had vivid memories of racial violence in his childhood, while her mother’s parents were part of the migration of African Americans from Alabama, via Kentucky, who sought to find a better life in the North. Morrison’s father’s occupations, including car washing, steel-mill welding, road construction, and shipyard work, typified the eclectic labor lifestyle of African American men living during the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s. Her mother worked at home and sang in church.

Morrison’s parents taught her much about understanding racism and growing up in a predominantly White America. Her father was not very optimistic about the capacity of White people to transcend their bigotry toward Black people and remained acutely distrusting of all White people, and he preferred to concentrate on Black culture, frequently telling her fairy tales about African American life. Her mother’s judgment about White people was less pessimistic, although she adhered to the thinking that strength and hope in the Black community had to be secured from within that community and not from without. These community values of the village became the cornerstone of Morrison’s literary and political thinking. Her focus was consistently directed within the Black community, a focus that reflected her confidence in the tangible culture of Black America and its crucial role in shaping strong and talented people.

In her childhood, Morrison’s eclectic literary tastes introduced her to such literary works as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and the works of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Jane Austen. Morrison was quite aware of the disparity that existed between the largely White worlds of these works and her own Black female experience. Her reading enabled her to understand the value of cultural specificity in literature and the universality of the particular. It also demonstrated that her own culture, values, dreams, and feelings were not being represented in the literature she was reading. In many ways, her movement toward writing fiction was spurred by a need to redress what she felt was a woeful silence about Black experiences in the literature she read.

After completing high school in Lorain in 1949, Morrison went on to receive her BA in English from Howard University. It was here that she got the nickname Toni. She became involved with theater and had the opportunity to travel through the South performing before Black audiences. These trips gave her a better understanding of the geographical reality of the Black American experience, a grounding that would be reproduced in her fiction. In 1953, she went on to Cornell University, where she completed her master’s degree two years later, studying suicide in the work of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. These writers were fitting figures against whom she could react as a writer. Faulkner, because of his White vision of the Southern experience, and Woolf, because of her White treatment of the female experience in a male-dominated world, provided Morrison with models which she would later adapt.

Morrison taught at Texas Southern University for two years and then taught at Howard. There, she honed her political views on Black America, arguing against the desegregation rhetoric of the time by suggesting that Black people needed greater economic independence and needed to be wary of distorting their own culture and values through assimilation. Several of her students, including Amiri Baraka, Andrew Young, and Stokely Carmichael, later became prominent in politics or literature.

While teaching at Howard in 1958, she married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect with whom she had two sons, Harold and Slade. The marriage was not a positive experience for Morrison; it left her feeling powerless and unsatisfied. She left Howard in 1964, divorced her husband, and assumed a post at Random House in New York City as an editor. Morrison continued her teaching career despite her intense work with Random House as a senior editor for many years.

Life’s Work

Morrison wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), during her painful marriage. The instinct to write was shaped by her need to read something identifiable to her. In this regard, Morrison identified with the discourse of the postcolonial writer who articulated her experience in a way that allowed that experience to overwhelm the domination of the culture of the colonizer. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison deftly treats the issues of identity and race with language and poetics that echo the writing of Frantz Fanon.

At the core of The Bluest Eye is the psychological trauma of Pecola, a Black girl’s experience of her racial identity in a predominantly White society. Her desire to have blue eyes represents the painful refutation of her own sense of self-worth as a Black child. The novel is posited as a parable, a tale that explores issues of incest, maturation, friendship, racism, and sexual violence through poetic language that is at once simple and startlingly complex. Morrison’s achievement with this first novel was to contribute a series of vivid images and literary insights (complete with their paradoxes and complexities) to the raging debate around the Black power movement of the late 1960s. Morrison provided a grounding for these ideas.

Morrison’s commitment to the Black experience continued in her second novel, Sula (1973), in which she makes a whole community a living character. In this community, the individuals are distinctive and complex. They range from the schizophrenic war veteran Shadrack to the doggedly independent and mysteriously explosive Eva, a virtual matriarch who commits an act of violence. The central character, Sula, is posited as a dangerous figure. She does not fit easy stereotypes but is, ultimately, associated with evil. Many Black critics shared the view that Sula is one of Morrison’s best works because of its deconstruction and reconstruction of myths surrounding motherhood, race, gender, and class in American society.

Morrison’s third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), has a male protagonist, Macon, or Milkman, who embarks on a journey south to discover a lost family treasure. His mammon-centered quest becomes a quest for self-discovery and a discovery of his ancestry. Morrison structures this narrative around a series of folktales. The work climaxes in the dramatic and magical flight of Macon, a flight associated with the African slave’s narrative of escape from the drudgery of slavery, which has been passed down through African American culture. Song of Solomon established Morrison’s reputation as a writer. The work was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for best novel. Critics and reviewers commended the work for its narrative force and its complex examination of the history of African Americans.

In Tar Baby (1981), her fourth novel, Morrison expanded her geographical boundaries, setting part of the novel in a fictional Caribbean island. The novel is a complex treatment of theories of sexuality and race that is couched in the African folktale of the tar baby, a term now considered a pejorative by many but which Morrison used to reflect her belief in the ability of Black women to “hold things together.” Morrison also included in this novel some examination of the traditions of B;ack rebellions, such as those of the Maroons, Caribbean Black people who had escaped from slavery.

In 1987, Morrison published Beloved , a frightening narrative about a formerly enslaved woman who murders her child to prevent the child from being enslaved. This horrifying act was a challenge for Morrison, who tried to articulate the realities that could make such an act possible. Beloved is layered with images and ideas that demonstrate Morrison’s commitment to using actual historical “texts” as the basis for her consistently mythic approach to fiction writing. Beloved was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and ten years later, became a critically acclaimed film directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Oprah Winfrey. In this work, as in all her novels, Morrison demonstrated a desire to speak to her own community or from that community. She bluntly stated that she wrote for a Black audience because she was writing for the village. She featured the novel’s central character in the opera Margaret Garner, for which she wrote the libretto, with music composed by Richard Danielpour. The opera premiered in 2005.

Morrison demonstrates this interest in writing primarily for Black audiences most vividly in her novel Jazz (1992), in which she uses the most fascinating elements of this African American musical form to shape her work. In Jazz, which is set in the 1920s during the Harlem Renaissance, the heyday of jazz music and Black innovation in the arts, Morrison applies the discipline and classical grounding of the music, its capacity to evoke the blues-like lament of Black experience and history, and its improvisational nature to create a novel that is not explicitly about jazz music but is in fact jazz itself.

In 1993, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for, according to the Swedish Academy, giving “life to an essential aspect of American reality.” The award represented the culmination of a series of accolades for Morrison. Her novels became classics in American literature and remain the subject of extensive critical study.

Morrison’s seventh novel, Paradise (1998), was intended as the final novel of a trilogy with Beloved and Jazz. It concerns the people of an Oklahoma town founded by the descendants of slaves in 1949. A quarter century later, the male leaders of that town come to suspect that a convent established nearby to help abused women is actually supporting a cult that poses a threat to their community. They attack and slaughter the women, regardless of race. The plot unfolds the aftermath of this desperate act on the town’s men and women and its effects on the community’s identity. Critics found the novel complex in its many narrative voices, its strong strain of supernaturalism, and its movement through history, from the first Black settlers in Oklahoma Territory following the Civil War to the late twentieth century, but most also praised its richness in constructing scenery and its exploration of African American identity themes. Others criticized as heavy handed its stark contrast between the mentality of women and men.

Love, published in 2003, again concerned an all-Black community, albeit a much smaller one. It is set in an East Coast resort that once thrived on African American trade during the segregation era but declined afterward. It focuses on two women trying living in a house once owned by the charismatic hotel owner Bill Cosey: his second wife, Heed, and his granddaughter, Christine, who are the same age. Once friends, they become enemies, both maneuvering to be sole owner of the house. Considered Morrison’s most accessible novel, Love is a discomforting examination of the damage wrought by a strong personality and the diverse influences of love on human motives, told in Morrison’s multistrand narrative structure.

Morrison also wrote a play, Dreaming Emmett , which premiered in Albany, New York, in 1986. It is based on the lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, an incident that helped galvanize the civil rights movement. Between 2002 and 2007, she wrote six fables for children with her son Slade, a musician and painter: The Big Box and The Book of Mean People, as well as The Lion or the Mouse?, The Ant or the Grasshopper?, Poppy or the Snake?, and The Mirror or the Glass?, all part of the series Who’s Got Game?. Her nonfiction books include Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993). the essay collection The House that Rat Built (1998), and Remember: The Journey to School Integration (2004) for young adults.

In 2009, Morrison returned to adult fiction with a late seventeenth-century historical novel, A Mercy. More so than in many of Morrison’s previous novels, the best-selling A Mercy highlights relations between Black people and White people and between the classes in early colonial America prior to the codification of race-based hereditary slavery.

Morrison’s son and sometime creative collaborator Slade died of cancer at age forty-five in December 2010. When asked about the grieving process, Morrison explained that her mourning initially kept her from writing, something rare in her life and that she realized her son would not have wanted. Ultimately, she was able to finish the novel she had been working on, Home (2012), about the homecoming of a Korean War veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder. It went on to be named best book of the year by National Public Radio and the St. Louis Dispatch and a New York Times Notable Book. It was even chosen as topical reading for West Point’s English literature curriculum. Her writing continued with the publication of the novel God Help the Child, a contemporary story of child abuse and race, in 2015. It received mostly mixed reviews from critics. In September 2017 she published The Origin of Others. Based on her 2016 Norton Lectures at Harvard University, the nonfiction collection features her reflections on the predominant themes of her oeuvre: race, xenophobia, fear, borders, mass migration, the longing to belong, and the phenomenon of Othering.

As with many Nobel laureates in literature, Morrison has been considered a cultural spokesperson, and her pronouncements received wide attention. For instance, when she called Bill Clinton the first “Black” president of the United States because his background was similar to that of many poor Southern African Americans, she inspired both plaudits and ridicule from political commentators. In the early 2010s, she spoke out on issues such as the Trayvon Martin murder case, women’s reproductive rights, and racism in the Republican Party. She also published highly intelligent discussions of her works in numerous interviews and essays. Her writings have forced literary critics to reevaluate their innate suspicion of those who write and speak about their own works. The combination of novels and Morrison’s engaging commentaries reveal her deeply committed psyche and spirit. Her reviews and critical articles published in the New York Times and its Review of Books (to which she was a regular contributor for years) constitute a significant body of critical approaches to literature and culture. Her commitment has been to her African American experience, and her goal has been to evolve a literary aesthetic that is intrinsically African and American.

In addition to receiving many literary awards, Morrison received the Barnard Medal of Distinction in 1979 from Barnard College as well as an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 2005. In 2006, she was a guest curator at the Louvre in Paris for the art series The Foreigner’s Home. She became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1981 and served on the editorial board of the Nation magazine. She continued her teaching career with appointments at Yale University, Bard College, the State University of New York campuses at Purchase and Albany, and Princeton University, where she held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities from 1989 until her retirement in 2006, when she became professor emeritus. In her retirement from teaching, Morrison was accorded a number of honors, including the 2004 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work—Fiction for Love, the 2005 Coretta Scott King Award for Remember: The Journey to School Integration, France’s Legion of Honor in 2010, and the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

Despite receiving widespread acclaim, Morrison’s work generated some controversy during her life. In late 2013, the Ohio Board of Education sought to censor The Bluest Eye, which had been added to the state’s list of recommended literature that illustrated the desired reading level for high school students. Critics claimed that scenes in the book depicting incestuous rape were unfit for high schoolers and amounted to pornography. Nonetheless, under pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union, the book was retained on the state’s list as it was merely an example, not a required book. However, even after Morrison's death, attempts to ban her works continued in some communities. Indeed, the American Library Association (ALA) recognized The Bluest Eye as one of the ten most banned books in the US between 2000 and 2020.

Significance

Morrison’s fiction writing achieved what August Wilson achieved in drama: it provided American literature an insight into the dignity and richness of African American culture in a manner that both chronicled the history of this culture and celebrated its uniquely brilliant ethos through the use of language, folk forms, and narrative traditions.

As a commentator on her own work, Morrison brilliantly analyzed her lyrical sensibility and contextualized the experience of the African American artist in American literature. Her work represents possibility and legitimizes the inclination of African American artists to delve into the African American experience without fear of being deemed irrelevant, inaccessible, or parochial. She also demonstrated this commitment in her editorial work. Her crucial role in the publication of Middleton Harris’s The Black Book (1974) demonstrates her concern for preserving images of African culture in America’s collective consciousness.

Apart from her talent as an artist, Morrison brought an intensely political engagement to her art. She spoke of the irrelevance of work that is not political. Politics, for her, embraced the elements of relevance, accountability, and truth. She was a leading voice among African American women writers who were not afraid to emphasize their political discourse. Others who have shared this ethos and spoken of Morrison’s leadership in this regard include Toni Cade Bambara, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou.

Morrison also worked as a teacher and an editor for most of her adult life, and she brought these skills to bear on her own work. She was a committed defender of the rights of women and spoke against injustices against women. More importantly, she supplied intelligent and cogent criticism of the White feminist movement from the perspective of an African American woman.

In her later years, Morrison lived in Grand View-on-Hudson, New York. She died on August 5, 2019, in the Bronx, of complications from pneumonia. She was eighty-eight years old. Her survivors include her son, Harold Ford Morrison, and three grandchildren.

Bibliography

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Christiansë, Yvette. Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics. New York: Fordham UP, 2013. Print.

Fox, Margalit. “Toni Morrison, Towering Novelist of the Black Experience, Dies at 88.” The New York Times, 6 Aug. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/toni-morrison-dead.html. Accessed 7 Aug. 2019.

Fulmer, Jacqueline. Folk Women and Indirection in Morrison, Ni Dhuibhne, Hurston, and Lavin. Burlington: Ashgate, 2007. Print.

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Fultz, Lucille P., ed. Toni Morrison: Paradise, Love, A Mercy. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print.

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King, Lovalerie, and Lynn Orilla Scott, eds. James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays. New York: Macmillan, 2006. Print.

Morrison, Toni. “Toni Morrison on Love, Loss and Modernity.” Interview by Ariel Leve. Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 17 July 2012.

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Wilentz, Gay. Binding Cultures: Black Women Writers in Africa and the Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. Print.