Toni Morrison was the first black woman to receive a Nobel Prize for literature. Morrison was born on February 18, 1931. Toni was brought up to be proud of her heritage and rich historical background. As a child, Toni loved the arts. Reading was among her favorite pastimes. 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. She attended the prestigious Howard University in Washington, D.C., and majored in English with a minor in classics. Toni graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. She then attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and received a master's degree in 1955. Offered a job at Texas Southern University in Houston, she taught introductory English. At Texas Southern they celebrated black heritage with Negro history week and introduced to her the idea of black culture as a discipline. In 1957 she returned to Howard University as a member of the faculty. This was a time of civil rights movement and she met several people who were later active in the struggle. She met the poet Amiri Baraka (at that time called LeRoi Jones) and Andrew Young (who later worked with Dr. Martin Luther King , and later still, became a mayor of Atlanta, Georgia). One of her students was Stokely Carmichael , who then became a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Another of her students, Claude Brown, wrote Manchild in the Promised Land, which was published in 1965 and became a classic of African-American literature. In 1967 she was transferred to New York and became a senior editor at Random House. The Bluest Eye her first novel was eventually published in 1970 to much critical acclaim although it was not commercially successful. She soon started writing her second novel where she focused on a friendship between two adult black women. Sula, her second book, was published in 1973. Excerpts were published in the Redbook magazine and it was nominated for the 1975 National Book Award in fiction. Beloved was published in 1987 and was a bestseller. In 1988 it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 1987, Toni Morrison was named the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University. She became the first black woman writer to hold a named chair at an Ivy League University. In 1993, Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was the eighth woman and the first black woman to do so. |
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