Toni Morrison was born on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio as Chloe Anthony Wofford. She grew up with her three siblings and with her mother and father, George and Ramah Wofford. George primarily worked as a ship welder but also worked three jobs to support his family. Ramah worked as a domestic worker and was very religious. Her family made sure to instill her African American heritage by preaching Southern African American songs and folklore. Her parents originally lived in the South but moved to the North to escape segregation and find better opportunities for themselves and their children. They lived in an integrated neighborhood with racism still at risk. However, she never really experienced discrimination whilst living in Ohio. Toni attended an integrated primary school where she was one of the only African American students. She then attended Lorain High School and graduated with honors in 1949. She developed a love for reading during these years.
After high school, she moved to Washington DC to attend Howard University where she majored in English. She began to see segregation firsthand when she joined the Howard University Players which was a theatrical company that created shows to display the African American experience of life. They often took tours of the South for research purposes which exposed Toni to evident racism and segregation which she had never really seen. These tours of the South heavily influenced her work and her perspective on life. Toni graduated in 1953 with a Bachelor’s degree in English. After graduating, she began to call herself Toni since most people she encountered couldn't pronounce Chloe (her biological name) correctly. Toni then continued her education at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York where she received her Master’s degree in English. After she graduated in 1955, she began teaching English at the Texas Southern University in Houston.
In 1957, Toni moved back to Washington D.C where she was offered a position at Howard University to teach. Whilst teaching at Howard, she met her husband, Harrold Morrison. They got married in 1958. Their first son, Harold Ford was born in 1961. Whilst pregnant, she joined a writers' group where she had to prepare a short story for discussion each week. Her first novel stemmed from a story she wrote in the group. Whilst being pregnant with her second child, Slade Morrison, she moved back in with her parents and divorced her husband. She took these years off from work to spend time with her sons and to continue writing as a hobby. In 1964, Morrison obtained a job with a textbook subsidiary of Random House in Syracuse, New York as an associate editor. In 1967, she was promoted to senior editor of Random House. Whilst working there, she began sending her own writing to various publishers. Her novel The Bluest Eye was published in 1970 and it received a large amount of critical acclaim especially for a first novel. The text told the story of an African American girl who struggled to meet the beauty standards of her time. She wished to have blue eyes and she thought it was a key to being happy.
After the substantial success of her first novel, she soon started writing Sula which focused on a friendship between two ablack women. It observed the dynamics of friendship and the expectations for conformity within the community. Sula became an alternate selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Excerpts were published in the Redbook magazine and it was nominated for the 1975 National Book Award in fiction. While continuing her career as an author, she continued to teach. While writing her third novel, Song of Solomon, she was a constant visitor lecturer at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Song of Solomon depicted an African American man on a journey to find his identity. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Morrison was also appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the National Council on the Arts after she won these awards. One of her most famous novels up to date is Beloved. Beloved was published in 1987 and it was about a woman who was a slave who killed her daughter so she won’t have to be a slave. However when the woman escapes slavery the ghost of her child haunts her. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It was also remade into a movie years later starring Oprah Winfrey. She wrote many more novels but the ones I mentioned are her most popular and award winning selections.
Toni’s novels and hard work brought her much fame and many awards. For example, in 1993, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African American woman to receive this award. She broke barriers for women, African Americans, and novelists around the world. Morrison was also a professor in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. Her work earned her an honorary Doctorate degree from the University of Oxford, and the opportunity to be a guest curator at the Louvre museum in Paris. In 2000, she was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress. Beloved was chosen in 2006 by a New York Times survey of writers as the best work of American fiction of the last quarter century. Toni was a trustee of the New York Public Library and a member of the American Academy, the Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2012, President Obama awarded Toni Morrison the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. Overall Toni was an inspiration to so many people around the world. Her novels with themes of African American life gave diversity and influences to literature for years to come. Toni sadly died on August 5, 2019 but her memory withstands. She is still the powerful and beautiful woman and soul she always was.