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• TONI MORRISON POSTERS
Celebrate Black History
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Toni Morrison
b. 2-18-1931; Lorain, OH
Opera singer Leontyne Price once said of her friend Toni Morrison: “She paints pictures with words. And reading or hearing those words is like listening to music.” The idea of comparing a book to a piece of music man seem stange at first. But people have always talked about Toni Morrison's unique and beautiful “voice.” By this they mean her almost magical way of making words on the printed page come alive in the reader's imagination, so that it sometimes seems as though she or her characters are speaking directly to you.
Toni Morrison was born in the small town of Lorain, Ohio, in 1931 and given the name Chloe Anthony Wofford. But for much of her life has used the shortened version of her middle name, Toni. Her grandparents migrated north from Greenville, Alabama, in the early 1900s, finally settling in Lorain, on the shores of Lake Erie. As a child, Toni was fascinated by stories. She was one of three black students in her first grade class, and the only student who could read. She remembers how her parents told her wonderfully scary stories, and how her grandmother kept a "dream book" in which she wrote down her dreams and tried to explain what they meant. As a teenager, Toni devoured great novels by writers like Leo Tolstoy and Jane Austen. Strangely enough, however, she was not thinking about becoming a writer – she wanted to be a dancer. It was only later that she realized she had her own stories to tell, and that her true destiny was to be a writer.
When she was attending Howard University, Toni met the man she would later marry, a Jamaican student named Harold Morrison. The marriage ended in 1964, leaving her with two sons to raise on her own. She took a job as a textbook editor in New York, and began work on her first novel, “The Bluest Eye.” That was followed by “Sula” – a tragic story of two black women in Ohio. But it was her third novel, “Song of Solomon,” that first brought Toni Morrison widespread auccess and acclaim. In 1988, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel “Beloved.” And in 1993, she became the first African American to receive literature's highest award: the Nobel Prize. Toni Morrison's books have been praised by readers and critics for their beautiful language, vivid descriptions, and unusual combination of magic, superstition and realism. Her stories tell of the ancient struggles between men and women, between blacks and whites, between hatred and love. But most of all they tell about people – people whose lives had for too long been overlooked, and whose stories had for too many years been left untold.
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Voices of Diversity Poster no longer available
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Toni Morrison
Poster Text: I my mother was in a singing mood, it wasn't so bad. She would sing about hard times, bad times, and somebody- done- gone- and- left- me times. But her voice was so sweet and her singing-eyes so melty I found myself longing for those hard times. The Bluest Eye
Many people say that Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison is more than a great writer – she is an artist. “She paints pictures with words,” says opera singer Leontyne Price. “And reading or hearing those words is like listening to music.”
Toni Morrison was actually born Chloe Anthony Wofford. Toni was a nickname she got in college at Howard University. Ironically, naming, and the importance of names, are major themes in here writing. Although she grew up poor in the steel mill town of Lorain, Ohio, Toni's parents made sure she never felt inferior to anyone else. “I felt like an aristocrat – or hwat I think an aristocrate is,” she says. Early on, she learned the power of words. Toni was one of three black students in her first grade class – and the only student could read. As she got older, she read everything from Tolstoy to Flaubert to Jane Austen.
As an adult, Ms. Morrison worked as a book editor, helping to publish important works by and about African Americans. And she worked on her own writing. Her first book, The Bluest Eye, is about an African American girl who believes that her bleak life would be transformed in she had blue eyes. It received a lot of praise, but her third novel, Song of Solomon, cemented her reputation and won the 1977 National Book Critics Circle Award, Beloved, the story of an escaped slave who kills her infant daughter rather than see her in slavery, brought even further acclaim, winning the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. And in 1993, Ms. Morrison became the first black women and the first African American to receive the Nobel Prize for literature.
Ms. Morrison's work forcuses on black culture and society, and in identity and community. And she feels that being a black woman has helped her as a writer. “I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and a female person are greater than those of people who are neither,” she says. “My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.”
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Beloved Movie Oprah Winfrey Danny Glover Original Poster Print
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“The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”
Toni Morrison,
b. 2-18-1931; Lorain, OH
• Toni Morrison BOOKS, VIDEO
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison -Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s first novel. Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. The focus is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove who longs for blue eyes so she’ll be lovable.
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison - In this celebrated novel, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison created a new way of rendering the contradictory nuances of black life in America. Its earthy poetic language and striking use of folklore and myth established Morrison as a major voice in contemporary fiction. Song of Solomon begins with one of the most arresting scenes in our century's literature: a dreamlike tableau depicting a man poised on a roof, about to fly into the air, while cloth rose petals swirl above the snow-covered ground and, in the astonished crowd below, one woman sings as another enters premature labor. The child born of that labor, Macon (Milkman) Dead, will eventually come to discover, through his complicated progress to maturity, the meaning of the drama that marked his birth.
Beloved by Toni Morrison - In the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a former slave. This angry, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life difficult for Sethe and her family; nevertheless, the woman finds the haunting oddly comforting for the spirit is that of her own dead baby, never named, thought of only as Beloved. Beloved is a dense, complex novel that yields up its secrets one by one. As Morrison takes us deeper into Sethe’s history and her memories, the horrifying circumstances of her baby's death start to make terrible sense. And as past meets present in the shape of a mysterious young woman about the same age as Sethe’s daughter would have been, the narrative builds inexorably to its powerful, painful conclusion. Beloved may well be the defining novel of slavery in America, the one that all others will be measured by.
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison - The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved and Jazz now gives us a learned, stylish, and immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that promises to change the way we read American literature even as it opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race.
Toni Morrison’s brilliant discussions of the Africanist presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. She shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree-and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires.
Written with the artistic vision that has earned Toni Morrison a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.
Profile of a Writer: Toni Morrison VHS (1987) -
LINKS FOR LEARNING: TONI MORRISON
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