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Biography: Life of Toni Morrison
Born 1931
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio. Her family had moved to Lorain to escape racism in the South. Chloe lived in an immigrant neighborhood and attended an integrated school.
After graduating from Lorain High School in 1949, Chloe attended Howard University in Washington, D.C. Here she changed her name to Toni, a shortened version of her middle name, supposedly because people found Chloe difficult to pronounce. In 1953 Toni Wofford graduated from Howard with a B.A. degree in English. She received a master’s degree from Cornell University in 1955. From 1955 to 1957 she taught English at Texas Southern University.
In 1957 Toni Wofford took a teaching position at Howard University. Here she met Harold Morrison, whom she married in 1958. The couple had two sons. While teaching and caring for her family, Toni Morrison joined a writer’s group as an escape from an unhappy marriage.
Having divorced her husband, in 1964 Toni Morrison moved to Syracuse, New York where she worked as a textbook editor. In the evenings she began writing a novel based on a story she had conceived while with the writer’s group.
In 1967 Toni Morrison was transferred to New York City and became a senior editor at Random House. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. While continuing to work at Random House, Morrison was an associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Purchase. Her second novel, Sula, was published in 1973.
Toni Morrison gained international attention with the publication of Song of Solomon in 1977. This work won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Her novel, Tar Baby, was published in 1981.
Toni Morrison left Random House in 1983 and accepted a position at the State University of New York in Albany. Her play Dreaming Emmett, which is based on the story of Emmett Till, premiered on January 4, 1986 in Albany.
Toni Morrison’s best-selling novel Beloved was published in 1987. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988.
In 1987 Toni Morrison became the first black woman to hold a named chair at an Ivy League university when she was named the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University.
In 1993 Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first black woman to receive the award.
Other novels by Toni Morrison include: Jazz published in 1992; Paradise published in 1998; and Love published in 2003.
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