Jimoh,, A Yemisi, PhD

English

ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

University of Massachusetts AmherstScholarWorks@UMass AmherstAfro-American Studies Faculty Publication Series Afro-American Studies2002Toni Morrison: BiographyA Yemisi Jimoh, PhDUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst, jimoh@afroam.umass.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/afroam_faculty_pubsPart of the African American Studies Commons, American Literature Commons, and the OtherAmerican Studies CommonsThis is brought to you for free and open access by the Afro-American Studies at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion inAfro-American Studies Faculty Publication Series by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, pleasecontact scholarworks@library.umass.edu.Recommended CitationJimoh,, A Yemisi PhD, "Toni Morrison: Biography" (2002). The Literary Encyclopedia. 88.Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/afroam_faculty_pubs/884/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format1/14www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_people.php?UID=3214Toni Morrison (1931-)Send to printerA Yemisi Jimoh (University of Massachusetts Amherst)(Chloe Anthony Wofford)Dramatist/ Playwright, Essayist, Novelist,Poet, Political writer, Story-writer,Children's/Young Adult writer, Editor,Publisher, Teacher/ Professor. Active 1970- in United StatesFew writers achieve the unusual distinction ofreceiving commercial success along with themost distinguished acclaim and awardsavailable in arts and letters: Nobel Prize forLiterature; Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; NationalBook Award (nomination); American BookAward; National Book Critics Circle Award andthe American Academy and Institute of Artsand Letters Award in the same year;appointment to the National Council on the4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format2/14www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_people.php?UID=3214Arts; election to the American Academy andInstitute of Arts and Letters; Condorcet Medal;member of the Schomburg Center Commissionfor the Preservation of Black Culture; NationalBook Foundation Medal for DistinguishedContribution to American Letters; NationalEndowment for the Humanities’ JeffersonLecturer; numerous honorary degrees; fourmonths on the best-sellers’ list; two books, indifferent genres, listed simultaneously on thebest-sellers’ list; Book-of-the-Month Clubselection. Such eminence, however, is the casefor Toni Morrison, a writer who has received orbeen nominated for every major literary honor.In 1931, during the early years of the greateconomic Depression, George Wofford andRamah Willis Wofford’s second child of fourwas born. The couple named their daughterChloe Ardelia Wofford. She would begin to callherself Toni in the 1950s while anundergraduate at Howard University.Morrison’s father, whose primary employmentwas as a ship-welder, though he held severaljobs in order to ensure his family’s survival,migrated from Georgia to Ohio seeking refugefrom the Jim Crow segregation of the South.Her maternal grandparents, Ardelia Willis andJohn Solomon Willis, had migrated initially4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format3/14www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_people.php?UID=3214from Alabama to Kentucky with their twelvechildren. John Solomon Willis learned how toread through his own efforts and those of hissister; he was also a self-taught violinist. Willisinherited eighty-eight acres of land from hisNative American mother, Morrison’s great-grandmother. The story of how he lost his landto unscrupulous white men and was forced towork as a sharecropper on that land figuresprominently in Morrison’s third novel, Song ofSolomon (1977). From Kentucky the Willisesmoved to Ohio, after finding that the young,white teacher in the small, rural southernschool which their daughters attended had tolearn long division from the Willises’ girls. InOhio, they believed, their children wouldreceive a better education than was available tothem in the South. Ramah Willis, ToniMorrison’s mother, was a high schoolgraduate, and Morrison is the first of herfamily to earn a college degree, though not thefirst to attend college.Toni Morrison spent her childhood and youthin the small Midwestern steel-town of Lorain,Ohio, located just twenty-five miles west ofCleveland and comprised primarily ofEuropean immigrants and a small number ofAfrican American migrants from the South.4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format4/14www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_people.php?UID=3214During the 1930s and 1940s, when Morrisonlived in Lorain, most of the residents lived onmeagre incomes, which were supplementedwith community support and governmentrelief. Morrison’s life in Lorain, outside ofschool, was firmly situated among a smallcommunity, twenty-three blocks, of blackresidents. The Woffords were great storytellersas well as believers in spiritual or mystical waysof knowing. Morrison’s memories of herfamily’s unquestioned acceptance of, and beliefin, mystical occurrences, the stories of herparents’ lives, as well as the folktales she heardwhile young, influence her deep sense of theimportance of African American history andculture as well as her uses of that culture andhistory in her writing.Toni Morrison also values her mid-western,Ohio, upbringing, as it has influenced herwriting by providing her an imaginative terrainon which to operate without the yoke ofstereotypes. Morrison says, “It is neitherplantation nor Ghetto”. While Morrison’s lifein a small Ohio town locates her outside thetypical pigeonholes in which many willfrequently discuss African American life, thisenvironment also positions her firmly withinthe crosswinds of the politics of color and the4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format5/14www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_people.php?UID=3214social construction of race along with itsresulting racialized social and political policies.Ohio is a state that has a long and valuedabolitionist history, including an importantrole in the Underground Railroad, yetMorrison also reports that, as a border statewith Kentucky, the Ku Klux Klan could befound in Ohio (Taylor-Guthrie 158)In 1949, after graduating at the top her highschool class, Chloe Wofford left Lorain, Ohio,and moved to Washington D.C. where sheattended Howard University. While a studentat Howard, Morrison gained her first sustainedexposure to the South after she joined theHoward University Players, a repertory troupethat traveled through the South during thesummers. She also changed her name to Toni.Morrison completed her Bachelor’s degree in1953 at Howard University before moving toIthaca, New York to attend Cornell University.Her Cornell University Master’s thesis,“Virginia Woolf’s and William Faulkner’sTreatment of the Alienated” addresses theissue of suicide in both modernist writers.Morrison had planned to become a teacherwhen she began her education at HowardUniversity, though her youthful aspiration inLorain was to become a dancer. Following the4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format6/14www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_people.php?UID=3214completion of her Master’s degree at Cornell in1955, Morrison was employed as an Englishinstructor at Texas Southern University, which,like Howard, to which she would return as aninstructor in 1957, is an historically blackuniversity.Within a year of Chloe “Toni” Wofford’s returnto Washington, D.C. to teach in her almamater, she married Harold Morrison, anarchitect. During their short marriage, thecouple would have two sons, Harold Ford,whose middle name was selected in honor ofMorrison’s family name, and Kevin Slade.While employed as an instructor in Englishand humanities at Howard University, ToniMorrison joined a small writers’ group inwhich the participants were required to writeliterary pieces and present them to the groupfor critique. For this group, Morrison hurriedlywrote a short story about a black girl whodesired blue eyes. Morrison would return tothis story several years later while living in NewYork. The expanded and revised version of thisstory would become her first novel The BluestEye, which Holt, Rinehart, and Winstonpublished in 1970. The Bluest Eye, which waspublished at the height of the Black ArtsAesthetics Movement of the 1960s and 1970s,4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format7/14www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_people.php?UID=3214addresses the crucial issue of identity and theways in which both community and societycontribute – sometimes in damaging ways – tothe shaping of identity. Morrison’s first novelreceived modest critical attention andprimarily tepid reviews, as The Bluest Eye wasmisunderstood by most of its contemporaryreviewers and only found an enthusiasticreception in reviews that appeared in BlackWorld and Freedomways.Following the end of her marriage and afterleaving the teaching position at Howardbecause she lacked the Ph.D. required fortenure, Toni Morrison eventually obtained aposition in 1965 as associate editor at L. W.Singer in Syracuse, New York, the textbookdivision of the publishing conglomerateRandom House. It was during this time thatMorrison returned to her story about the littleblack girl who wanted blue eyes. Toni Morrisonre-wrote this story in the evenings afterworking at Singer and after settling herchildren in for the night. By 1968 Morrison wasthe senior editor for trade publications atRandom House in New York City. She workedas senior editor for Random House until 1983.While there, Morrison edited books by ToniCade Bambara, Angela Davis, Henry Dumas,4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format8/14www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_people.php?UID=3214Lucille Clifton, Leon Forrest, Gayle Jones, JuneJordan, James Alan McPherson, JohnMcClusky, Gloria Naylor, and many others. Asan editor, Toni Morrison also was instrumentalin the publication of The Black Book (1974), aninnovative collection of historical documentsrelated to African American heritage. Whileworking to bring this project to press,Morrison happened upon a nineteenth-centurynewspaper story about Margaret Garner, afugitive from slavery who killed her child toavoid returning the child to forced bondage.This story would form the basis for Morrison’sfifth novel, Beloved (1987).In 1971, while still employed as a senior editorat Random House, Morrison began teaching atthe State University of New York at Purchase,and since then has taught or lectured atnumerous colleges and universities, includingYale, Bard, Harvard, Rutgers, Trinity CollegeCambridge, the State University of New York atAlbany, the University of California at Berkeley,Bowdoin College, and Princeton.Despite the fact that her second novel, Sula,received mixed reviews, Toni Morrison’s finely-honed literary ability had established for her aplace in the world of letters and also marked4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format9/14www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_people.php?UID=3214the beginning of her ongoing publishingrelationship with Alfred A. Knopf, which haspublished all of her novels sinceSula wasreleased in 1973. As Morrison’s stature in theliterary world increased, she began to publishregularly in the New York Times BookReview and in the New York Times Magazine;she continues to contribute articles to anumber of journals, newspapers, andmagazines. Among the numerous noteworthyessays by Toni Morrison that have appeared inprint during her more than thirty years as awriter and cultural analyst are “UnspeakableThings Unspoken: The Afro-AmericanPresence in American Literature”, whichappeared in Michigan Quarterly Review in1989, “What the Black Woman Thinks aboutWomen’s Lib”, which was published in NewYork Times Magazine in 1971, and“Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation”,which was included in Black Women Writers(1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited byMari Evans. In all of the aforementionedessays, Morrison presents provocativepositions on African American culture andchallenges individuals who work with culturalconcepts to approach African Americancultural issues on their own terms rather thanencumbering them with concepts and ideas4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format10/14www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_people.php?UID=3214that do not explain African American culture,or worse, that disparage it.Much of Morrison’s literary corpus providesrepresentative examples of literaryarchaeology, as some would term it. Thisapproach to literature combines a writer’simagination and experience along withrecovered history to produce what ToniMorrison refers to as “village literature” or“village fiction” (LeClair 26, Morrison 39). Thefirst novel in Morrison’s oeuvre in which shemost effectively combines the above aspects ofAfrican American culture is Song of Solomon,which she wrote while grieving the loss of herfather. In this novel, Morrison applies hercapacious imagination to African Americanfolktales, to her family history, and to socialand political history in the United States. Thissame combination of imaginative, social, andpolitical energies informs Toni Morrison’spresumptive trilogy onlove: Beloved(1987), Jazz (1992),and Paradise (1998). These novels gain asubstantial part of their power from the eventsthat informed Morrison’s writing of them: thefugitive Margaret Garner; quotidian black lifein New York City during the New Negro era;the formation of black towns throughout the4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format11/14www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_people.php?UID=3214South and in southern border states followingthe failures of Reconstruction late in thenineteenth century. Additionally, because ofher understanding of African Americanheritage, her literary aesthetic is informed byJazz music, which produces a style that issophisticated and accessible, if engaged with amoderate quantity of effort. Toni Morrison’sfourth novel, TarBaby (1981), takes animaginative twentieth-century cosmopolitanapproach to an African and African Americanfolk concept – the tar baby. Morrison employsher complex writing style in her eighth andninth novels, Love (2003) and A Mercy(2008), in order to return to issues andconcerns found in her earlier narratives. InLove she reimagines her previousrepresentation of female friendship, and in AMercy, Morrison examines slavery and othervarieties of servitude in seventeenth-centuryBritish Colonial North America.Toni Morrison is a prolific woman of letterswhose contribution to the cultural landscape ofthe United States expands beyond her novels.Among Morrison’s three books that appearedin print in 1992 is her seminal work of literarytheory, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness andthe Literary Imagination. This book4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format12/14www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_people.php?UID=3214reproduces her Massey Lectures in the Historyof American Civilizations, which she presentedat Harvard University in 1990. She is also theeditor or co-editor of numerous books,including Rac-ing Justice, En-genderingPower: Essays on Anita Hill, ClarenceThomas, and the Construction of SocialReality (1992); Deep Sightings and RescueMissions: Fiction, Essays, andConversations (1996); and Birth of aNation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle inthe O. J. Simpson Trial (1997). Morrison’sartistic work also includes a short story,“Recitatif” (1983); a play, Dreaming Emmett,which was performed in Albany, New York in1986; lyrics, “Honey and Rue”, written in 1992for acclaimed opera singer Kathleen Battle andpublished in 1995; a children’s book, The BigBox (1999), co-written with Slade Morrison,her son; in 2002 Morrison’s poem “blackcrazies” was published in MS; and a libretto forthe opera Margaret Garner, which premieredin 2005. While Morrison has not written ascreenplay, two of her novels have beendeveloped into a screenplay. Toni CadeBambara wrote a film treatment for Morrison’sfourth novel Tar Baby, and the film rightsto Beloved were sold to Oprah Winfrey whostarred in and produced a motion picture4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format13/14www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_people.php?UID=3214based on the book.Toni Morrison continues to influence culture inthe United States through her writing andlecturing. She is currently the Robert F. GoheenProfessor in the Humanities, Emerita atPrinceton University. Her tenthnovel Home will be published May 2012.Works CitedLeClair, Thomas. Interview. “The LanguageMust Not Sweat: A Conversation with ToniMorrison. New Republic 184 (21 March 1981):25-29.Morrison, Toni. “City Limits, Village Values:Concepts of the Neighborhood in BlackFiction.” Literature and the Urban Experience.Eds. Michael C. Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts.New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1981. 35-43.Taylor-Guthrie, Danille. Conversations withToni Morrison. Jackson: UP of Mississippi,1994.Citation: Jimoh, A Yemisi. "Toni Morrison". TheLiterary Encyclopedia. 25 October 2002.[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3214, accessed 14 April 2012.]This article is copyright to ©The Literary Encyclopedia.For information on making internet links to this page and4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format14/14www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_people.php?UID=3214electronic or print reproduction, please read Linking andReproducing.All entries, data and software copyright © The LiteraryDictionary Company LimitedISSN 1747-678X

Toni Morrison: Biography

https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1093&amp;context=afroam_faculty_pubs

Toni Morrison: Biography

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst