Lorain’s Nobel novelist who began with The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison (1931–2019), born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Bluest Eye (1970) opened a career crowned by Song of Solomon (1977 National Book Critics Circle Award) and Beloved (1988 Pulitzer). Howard B.A. 1953 and Cornell M.A. 1955 preceded editing and teaching.
Jefferson Lecture and National Book Foundation medal both came in 1996. Raised in working-class Black Lorain, Ohio, by Ramah and George Wofford—mother from Greenville, Alabama migrant lines.
When she was about two, the landlord set the family's house on fire with them inside because they could not pay rent, and her parents answered by laughing at him rather than despairing. They raised her on folktales, ghost stories and songs, and she read Jane Austen and Tolstoy. Converting to Catholicism at twelve, she took the baptismal name Anthony, the source of Toni.
At Howard she began in drama under Anne Cooke Reid and Owen Dodson, and her Cornell thesis examined alienation in Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. She taught at Texas Southern University from 1955 to 1957 and then at Howard, where a writers' circle heard her short story about a Black girl longing for blue eyes, the germ of her first novel. Divorced, and with a second son, Slade, born in 1965, she joined L. W. Singer, Random House's textbook division in Syracuse, and two years later became the first Black woman senior fiction editor at Random House in New York.
There she championed Black writing, editing Contemporary African Literature (1972), with work by Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Athol Fugard, and The Black Book (1974), an anthology of documents of Black American life from slavery to the 1920s. Writing before dawn, she published The Bluest Eye at thirty-nine; Sula was nominated for the National Book Award in 1975 and Tar Baby followed in 1981. She left publishing in 1983 for a converted boathouse on the Hudson in Nyack, taught at SUNY and Rutgers, and wrote her first play, Dreaming Emmett, about the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, staged in 1986.
Source: Toni Morrison
