Beloved and Toni MorrisonJoin now to read essay Beloved and Toni MorrisonToni Morrison, the first black woman to receive Nobel Prize in Literature, was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, U.S.A. She was the second of four children of George Wofford, a shipyard welder and Ramah Willis Wofford. Her parents moved to Ohio from the South to escape racism and to find better opportunities in the North. Her father was a hardworking and dignified man. While the children were growing up, he worked three jobs at the same time for almost 17 years. Her mother was a church-going woman and she sang in the choir. At home, Chloe heard many songs and tales of Southern black folklore. The Woffords were proud of their heritage.
Chloe attended an integrated school. In her first grade, she was the only black student in her class and the only one who could read. She was friends with many of her white schoolmates and did not encounter discrimination until she started dating. She hoped one day to become a dancer like her favorite ballerina, Maria Tallchief, and she also loved to read. Her early favorites were the Russian writers Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, French author Gustave Flaubert and English novelist Jane Austen. She was an excellent student and she graduated with honors from Lorain High School in 1949.
Chloe Wofford then attended the prestigious Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she majored in English with a minor in classics. Since many people couldnt pronounce her first name correctly, she changed it to Toni, a shortened version of her middle name. She joined a repertory company, the Howard University Players, with whom she made several tours of the South. She saw firsthand the life of the blacks there, the life her parents had escaped by moving north. Toni Wofford graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. She then attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and received a masters degree in 1955.
At Howard she met and fell in love with a young Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison. They married in 1958 and their first son, Harold Ford, was born in 1961. Toni continued teaching while helping take care of her family. She also joined a small writers group as a temporary escape from an unhappy married life. Each member of this group was required to bring a story or poem for discussion. One week, having nothing to bring, she quickly wrote a story loosely based on a girl she knew in childhood who had prayed to God for blue eyes. The story was well received by the group and then Toni put it away thinking she was done with it. Her marriage deteriorated, and while pregnant with their second child she left her husband, left her job at the university, and took her son on a trip to Europe. Later, she divorced her husband and returned to her parents house in Lorain with her two sons.
In the fall of 1964 Morrison obtained a job with a textbook subsidiary of Random House in Syracuse, New York as an associate editor. Her hope was to be transferred soon to New York City. While working all day, the housekeeper took care of her sons and in the evening Morrison cooked dinner and played with the boys until their bedtime. When her sons were asleep, she started writing. She dusted off the story she had written for the writers group and decided to make it into a novel. She drew on her memories from childhood and expanded them with her imagination so that the characters developed a life of their own. She found writing exciting and challenging. Other than parenting, she found everything else boring by comparison.
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On a Sunday in June 1965, Morrison left her cottage in the woods for the airport. Three years and three months later, while waiting to board the flight to Syracuse, she went to work. A friend of her had told her about a trip that evening with a friend of her with whom she had once married. Morrison was standing beside a cab driving to a church in Rochester. “The hotel room is all that is left,” she said, “with our little boys, which I’ve never seen before.” At her own house in Syracuse, the next few years saw her at work. The next year, she made all of her work work and got a job with the store in Rochester. She then joined the local paper, New York’s Daily News, and wrote for the newspaper’s New York Daily News and The New York Times, as well as The New England Post. She then set out to write and sell books, and eventually sold about 20,000 total sales of the books she had written. All at a discount from a daily market price of about $25 and often less. (She had been married to an adult and the money she had earned while doing the writing for that newspaper amounted to an amount not mentioned.) Morrison had just gotten through one of her years on the job when her employer told her she was eligible to apply. She started writing, and soon realized that she needed to apply for an associate editor. Instead, she accepted. She received a check from Princeton’s Kennedy School of Government and became what she calls America’s first independent freelance writer–a “journalist, columnist, political editor, and editor, for the free.” For the next few years she ran for office in Maine, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and New York. Eventually, she took a job at Columbia University in New York before working as an assistant editor-in-chief under President Lyndon B. Johnson. She also became the first woman president to serve as a member of the Board of Curators of Higher Education at Princeton. In 1968, Morrison was elected president of the College of Arts and Sciences, where she received a $27,000 grant from the Foundation of American Art.
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In 1974, Ms. Morrison founded the National Book Award Winning Library Service, one of the top online fundraising organizations in the country. By 1973, she had raised $30,000 by selling more than 10 million copies of the National Review’s “Reclaim the Future”! It had also raised about 10 million more funds for the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Review, The American Action Network, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and many more, and for national and national publications by publishing hundreds of books a day. She has been honored with a Pulitzer Prize for her work as a first lady,
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On a Sunday in June 1965, Morrison left her cottage in the woods for the airport. Three years and three months later, while waiting to board the flight to Syracuse, she went to work. A friend of her had told her about a trip that evening with a friend of her with whom she had once married. Morrison was standing beside a cab driving to a church in Rochester. “The hotel room is all that is left,” she said, “with our little boys, which I’ve never seen before.” At her own house in Syracuse, the next few years saw her at work. The next year, she made all of her work work and got a job with the store in Rochester. She then joined the local paper, New York’s Daily News, and wrote for the newspaper’s New York Daily News and The New York Times, as well as The New England Post. She then set out to write and sell books, and eventually sold about 20,000 total sales of the books she had written. All at a discount from a daily market price of about $25 and often less. (She had been married to an adult and the money she had earned while doing the writing for that newspaper amounted to an amount not mentioned.) Morrison had just gotten through one of her years on the job when her employer told her she was eligible to apply. She started writing, and soon realized that she needed to apply for an associate editor. Instead, she accepted. She received a check from Princeton’s Kennedy School of Government and became what she calls America’s first independent freelance writer–a “journalist, columnist, political editor, and editor, for the free.” For the next few years she ran for office in Maine, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and New York. Eventually, she took a job at Columbia University in New York before working as an assistant editor-in-chief under President Lyndon B. Johnson. She also became the first woman president to serve as a member of the Board of Curators of Higher Education at Princeton. In 1968, Morrison was elected president of the College of Arts and Sciences, where she received a $27,000 grant from the Foundation of American Art.
[[4]] [[5]]
In 1974, Ms. Morrison founded the National Book Award Winning Library Service, one of the top online fundraising organizations in the country. By 1973, she had raised $30,000 by selling more than 10 million copies of the National Review’s “Reclaim the Future”! It had also raised about 10 million more funds for the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Review, The American Action Network, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and many more, and for national and national publications by publishing hundreds of books a day. She has been honored with a Pulitzer Prize for her work as a first lady,
In 1967 she was transferred to New York and became a senior editor at Random House. The Bluest Eye was eventually published in 1970 to much critical acclaim, although it was not commercially successful. From 1971-1972 Morrison was the associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Purchase while she continued working at Random House. In addition, she soon started writing her second novel where she focused on a friendship between two adult black women. Sula was published in 1973.
Song of Solomon, her third novel, was published in 1977. In 1981 she published her fourth novel, Tar Baby, where for the first time she describes interaction between black and white characters.
In 1983, Morrison left her position at Random House, having worked there for almost twenty years. Morrisons next novel, Beloved, was influenced by a published story about a slave, Margaret Garner, who in 1851 escaped with her children to Ohio from her master in Kentucky. When she was about to be re-captured, she tried to kill her children rather than return them to life of slavery. Only one of her children died and Margaret was imprisoned for her deed. She refused to show remorse, saying she was “unwilling to have her children suffer as she had done.” Beloved was published in 1987 and was a bestseller. In 1988 it won