About the Author

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931, Toni Morrison is the granddaughter of sharecroppers in the South. Raised in Lorraine, Ohio, she attended Howard University where she graduated in 1953. From there her studies took her to Cornell University where she earned a Masters Degree in English. Following her graduate work, she entered university teaching at several institutions, including Princeton, which later, along with the State University of New York at Albany, would award her an endowed chair.

The English professor Toni Wofford became Toni Morrison following her marriage to Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, but after two children, their marriage ended in divorce. After teaching, she entered the publishing industry, accepting a position at Random House where she remained for several years, rising to senior editor.

Morrison's novels explore the varied worlds of African-Americans. Her first three works, The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), and Song of Solomon (1977) address themes related to the experiences of rural Northern blacks. Tar Baby (1981) shifts both class and setting, examining professional and well-to-do blacks and whites in an intercontinental setting. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved is a gothic novel, set after the Civil War, featuring the haunting of a former slave by the ghost of her murdered child. Two subsequent works, Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998) examine sets of violent relationships, the first, within a dysfunctional family, and the latter, in an Oklahoma community stained by the murder of four black women.

Toni Morrison is one of the best known American novelists of the late twentieth century. In addition to her Pulitzer Prize, she also received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. Unequivocal and outspoken on American race relations between blacks and whites, Morrison articulates the anxieties that beset African-Americans in the United States and openly challenges some of the easy assumptions about being black and impoverished in a world controlled by whites.