Author Biography Toni Morrison Discussion Guide

TONI MORRISON DISCUSSION GUIDE (630) 232-0780 [email protected] AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY The second of the four children of George and Ramah (Willis) Wofford, Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, a steel town twenty-five miles west of Cleveland. During the worst years of the Great Depression, her father worked as a car washer, a welder in a local steel mill, and road-construction worker, while her mother, a feisty, determined woman, dealt with callous landlords and impertinent social workers. "When an eviction notice was put on our house, she tore it off," Morrison remembered, as quoted in People. "If there were maggots in our flour, she wrote a letter to [President] Franklin Roosevelt. My mother believed something should be done about inhuman situations." In an article for the New York Times Magazine, Morrison discussed her parents' contrasting attitudes toward white society and the effect of those conflicting views on her own perception of the quality of black life in America. Ramah Wofford believed that, in time, race relations would improve; George Wofford distrusted "every word and every gesture of every white man on Earth." Both parents were convinced, however, that "all succor and aid came from themselves and their neighborhood." Consequently, Morrison, although she attended a multiracial school, was raised in "a basically racist household" and grew up "with more than a child's contempt for white people." After graduating with honors from high school in 1949, Toni Morrison enrolled at Howard University in Washington, DC. Morrison devoted most of her free time to the Howard University Players, a campus theater company she described as "a place where hard work, thought, and talent" were praised and "merit was the only rank." She often appeared in campus productions, and in the summers she traveled throughout the South with a repertory troupe made up of faculty members and students. Morrison earned her BA degree in 1953 and then went on to Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, for graduate work in English. In 1955, on submission of what she later called a "shaky" thesis on the theme of suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, Morrison received an MA degree. After two years of teaching English "theory, pronunciation, and grammar" to undergraduates at Texas Southern University, in Houston, she joined the faculty of Howard University as an English instructor, a post she held until 1964. While at Howard, she met and married a Jamaican architect with whom she had two sons, Harold Ford and Slade Kevin. Unhappy in her marriage, Morrison began to write fiction in the early 1960s as an escape of sorts. "It was as though I had nothing left but my imagination," she said in an autobiographical sketch submitted to Current Biography. "I had no will, no judgment, no perspective, no power, no authority, no self, just this brutal sense of irony, melancholy, and 1 a trembling respect for words. I wrote like someone with a dirty habit. Secretly. Compulsively. Slyly." She eventually drifted into a small, informal group of poets and writers who met once a month to read, discuss, and criticize each other's work. For a while, Morrison took the "old junk" that she had written in high school, but one day, finding herself without a sample of writing to take to the meeting, she dashed off "a little story about a black girl who wanted blue eyes," which was the genesis of her first novel. In 1964, Morrison resigned from Howard and, after a divorce, moved with her children to Syracuse, New York, and then to New York City, where she worked as an editor for Random House. There, partly to alleviate her loneliness, she developed the short story she had written at Howard into a novel, and in 1969, Holt published The Bluest Eye, the story of two young sisters living in a tiny, provincial black community in Ohio in 1941 and of their friendship with Pecola Breedlove, a homely, outcast little girl so mercilessly victimized by her parents and narrow-minded neighbors that she eventually retreats into insanity. Described by Toni Morrison as a book about "the absolute destruction of human life because of the most superficial thing in the world - physical beauty," The Bluest Eye is, on one level, a treatment of the universal theme of the loss of innocence and, on another, an indictment of the physical and emotional poverty of middle-class black life during World War II. "Morrison exposes the negative of the Dick-and-Jane-and-Mother-and-Father-and-Dog-and-Cat photograph that appears in our reading primers, and she does it with a prose so precise, so faithful to speech, and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry," John Leonard wrote in his review for the New York Times (November 13, 1970). "I have said 'poetry.' But The Bluest Eye is also history, sociology, folklore, nightmare, and music." The Bluest Eye established Morrison as a brilliant observer of contemporary black America, and she was often asked to write social commentary for mass-market publications. As a senior editor at Random House she took a special interest in black fiction. "I want to participate in developing a canon of black work," she told Sandra Satterwhite in an interview for the New York Post. "We've had the first rush of black entertainment, where blacks were writing for whites, and whites were encouraging this kind of self-flagellation. Now we can get down to the craft of writing, where black people are talking to black people." Toni Morrison's own writing career took another step forward in late 1973, with the publication of Sula, an examination of the intense, forty-year friendship between two women: Nel, who accepts the conventional mores and rigid moral code of the insular black community that is her hometown, and Sula, who defies them. Much of the largely favorable critical response to Sula focused on Morrison's spare, precise language, economical, life-like dialogue, and convincing characterizations. To Sara Blackburn, who reviewed Sula for the New York Times Book Review, the main characters seemed "almost mythologically strong and familiar" and had the "heroic quality" of the characters of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Other reviewers, including Ruth Rambo McClain in Black World, Jerry H. Bryant in the Nation, and Faith Davis in the Harvard Advocate, seconded Blackburn's assessment and singled out for special praise Morrison's masterful creation of Sula, a complex woman who is at once self-reliant, amoral, predatory, alluring, and ruthless. For Jonathan Yardley, the most fully realized character in Sula was the tiny black community of Bottom. "Toni Morrison is not a Southern writer, but she has located place and community with the skill of a Flannery O'Connor or Eudora Welty," Yardley commented in the Washington Post. "Thus the novel is much more than a portrait of one woman. It is in large measure an evocation of a way of life that existed in the black communities of the small towns of the 1920s and 1930s, a way of life compounded of such ingredients as desperation, neighborliness, and 2 persistence." Sula was named an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and was nominated for the 1975 National Book Award in the fiction category. Morrison's third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), the personal odyssey of Macon Dead Jr., presented a different kind of challenge. "I had to think of becoming a whole person in masculine terms," she explained to Mel Watkins for a New York Times Book Review profile. "I couldn't use the metaphors I'd used describing women. I needed something that suggested dominion - a different kind of drive." The central metaphor in Song of Solomon is flying - the literal taking off and flying into the air, which is everybody's dream." Inspired by his great-grandfather Solomon's escape from slavery a century earlier, Macon, known as Milkman because his mother nursed him well past infancy, leaves his middle-class Midwestern home for the South, ostensibly to search for a secret cache of gold, but ultimately to find his family heritage. Song of Solomon was inevitably compared to Ralph Ellison's classic Invisible Man, to Alex Haley's Roots, and to Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. A few reviewers quibbled about the occasional vanished character and the myriad subplots; most, however, were overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Perhaps the most rapturous was John Leonard, who declared in his paean for the New York Times that Song of Solomon had been "a privilege to review." He was particularly taken by the evocative, poetic descriptions of places "where even love found its way with an ice pick" and where the "heavy, spice-sweet smell . made you think of the East and striped tents and the sha-sha-sha of leg bracelets." "From the beginning . Toni Morrison is in control of her book, her poetry," Leonard wrote. "Out of the decoding of a children's song, something heroic is regained; out of terror, an understanding of possibility and a leap of faith; out of quest, the naming of our fathers and ourselves." In 1978, Song of Solomon received the National Book Critics' Circle Award as the best work of fiction in 1977. It was the first novel written by a black author to be chosen as a full selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940. Morrison's Tar Baby (1981) is cast in the form of allegory. It begins on a French island in the Caribbean, at the home of a wealthy white man, Valerian, and his wife, Margaret.

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