Toni Morrison, whose original name was Chloe Anthony Wofford, was born on February 18th, 1931 in Loraine Ohio. She died on August 5th 2019, in Bronx, New York. Morrison grew up in the Midwest, her family loved black culture, and story telling, songs and folktale were a formative part of her childhood. She attended Howard University (B.A, 1951) and Cornell University (M.A, 1955). She was a University lecturer for a few years, she became the first black fiction editor at Random House for a number of years.
Morrison’s first book, The Bluest Eye was published in 1970. This was a novel about the initiation concerning a victimized adolescent Black girl who is obsessed by white standards of beauty and longs to have blue eyes. This was the first of many books written by Morrison. In the 1970s and 1980s, she developed her own reputation as an author, and her most celebrated work, Beloved, was made into a film in 1998.
Toni Morrison won a number of awards, in 1977 she won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She also was a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize (19870) for her novel, Beloved, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Morrison’s writings concentrated on rural Afro-American communities on their cultural inheritance. The intricacies of her writing does not just tell the reader about issues instead it shows them.
The following questions was emailed to the author
- How was your childhood?
- At what age did you know you would become a writer?
- Your books are said to be controversial, what is your take on that?
- Your main characters are person of African decent, what are your reasons for that?
- How does it feel to have won so many national awards as a black woman?
You can visit the author’s website to view more of her work https://www.tonimorrisonsociety.org/