To make money she cleaned houses for white families and worked as a secretary to the head librarian at the Lorain Public Library. When Morrison reached college age she decided to attend Howard University — her father took on another job in order to afford the tuition, flouting union rules.
After graduating from Cornell, Morrison embarked on her teaching career, first landing a job at Texas Southern University, and then back at Howard, where she taught the soon-to-be civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael.
It was there that she met Harold Morrison, an architect, and the couple wed ; the pair went on to have two children Ford and Slade before divorcing in During this era she began work on her first novel, The Bluest Eye , which depicted a victimized adolescent black girl obsessed by white beauty standards, and who begs God to turn her eyes blue.
She hoped to write a novel devoid of the white gaze, which she felt hovered over the work of even the most celebrated black writers like Ralph Ellison and Frederick Douglass. In , she published The Black Book , an anthology of African-American life and history that greatly influenced the perception of black anthropology and culture. As Morrison held down a full-time job and raised two children, she wrote whenever she could find time: at daybreak, or in the midst of a commute. Davis, interviewed in The Pieces I Am , recalls that Morrison would scribble paragraphs on the steering wheel of her car while stuck in traffic.
The latter, in particular, broke through to national audiences, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award. In , upon the release of her fourth novel, Tar Baby , she was on the cover of Newsweek , becoming the first black woman to appear on the cover of a national magazine since Zora Neale Hurston in Her best-known work, Beloved , was published in The novel is based on a true story Morrison came across while publishing The Black Book — of a runaway slave who kills her infant daughter after being recaptured by enslavers.
An instant sensation, the novel remained on the best-seller list for 25 weeks and was added to school reading lists across the country. From there, the newly single mother of two young sons relocated to Syracuse, New York, to attend Cornell University, later taking a job as an editor with Random House. In late December of , the same year Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature, a cinder jumped from the fireplace and the historic house began to burn.
Firefighters arrived at the scene to find flames shooting through the roof, and it was so cold water they sprayed to put it out miraculously managed to preserve several manuscripts. Ultimately, she rebuilt, with upgrades: bookcases, a patio, a private dock, and continued to live there, twenty-five miles north of Manhattan.
There were other homes, too. One in Princeton, where she taught; an apartment building upstate, owned with her sons and intended to house artists; a building across the street that functioned as a performance center.
The Real Deal's newsletters give you the latest scoops, fresh headlines, marketing data, and things to know within the industry. By clicking Subscribe you agree to our Privacy Policy. Javascript is disabled in your web browser. August 06, PM. By Elizabeth Kiefer. Toni Morrison Credit: Getty Images.
Tags Toni Morrison. Related Articles. Miami Herald brings on AI to cover real estate sales. Could blockchain disrupt title insurance? The man who raided Sears for its real estate riches. And the dream is this: that someone—God, perhaps—will grant her the gift of blue eyes. The kind of blue eyes Pecola has seen in pictures of the movie star Shirley Temple. The kind of blue eyes that she imagines lighting up the face of the girl on the wrapper of her favorite candies, Mary Janes.
Pecola feels, or the world has made her feel, that if she had blue eyes she would, at last, be free—free from her unforgivable blackness, from what her community labelled ugliness long before she could look in a mirror and determine for herself who and what she was.
Not that she ever looks in a mirror. Eventually, Pecola does acquire, or believes she acquires, blue eyes. In this short, intellectually expansive, emotionally questioning, and spiritually knowing book, the act of looking—and seeing—is described again and again. One example of many: Peering through a window in their family home, Claudia and her older sister, Frieda, catch a first glimpse of sex. A beloved boarder is consorting with a notorious prostitute.
Is that love? Or is it what a man does to, and not with, a female? Despite all this looking, few people, aside from Claudia, bear witness to much. To do so would be to think critically about the society that formed them and be moved to effect change. Cleanliness, of course, is next to godliness, and who would want to commit the double sin of being black and dirty?
And the truth is, by the time we leave Pecola, pecking at the waste on the margins of the world, we, too, may feel a measure of relief at no longer having to see what Morrison sees, her profound and unrelenting vision of what life can do to the forsaken. She began the book in , when she was thirty-four years old. She had majored in English at Howard University, after which she did her M.
Morrison put the draft in a drawer and got on with the business of living. In , she married the Jamaican architect Harold Morrison; seven years later, the couple was divorced, and Toni was by herself, supporting two young boys and working as an editor at L.
Singer, a textbook company in Syracuse, New York. During an argument, a neighbor called Morrison a tramp in front of her children. Morrison filed a two-hundred-thousand-dollar lawsuit, which she later dropped. She fought to protect herself, but how do you protect yourself from isolation or loneliness? Set near the start of the Second World War, before postwar prosperity changed Lorain, the book is narrated by Claudia, a feisty child, but the tone is elegiac, since a lot of the novel is driven by memory and the stories that shape it.
Before the narrative begins, Morrison gives us the crux of the tale in a sort of preface:. It was a long time before my sister and I admitted to ourselves that no green was going to spring from our seeds. Once we knew, our guilt was relieved only by fights and mutual accusations about who was to blame. It never occurred to either of us that the earth itself might have been unyielding.
Our innocence and faith were no more productive than his lust or despair. What is clear now is that of all of that hope, fear, lust, love, and grief, nothing remains but Pecola and the unyielding earth. The seeds shriveled and died; her baby too. There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
By dispensing with narrative suspense up front, Morrison the modernist focusses our attention on character, on how the stories we tell about and to one another often are the story. We first meet Claudia and Frieda when a white neighbor taunts them, and we are shown that whiteness has no erotic pull for Claudia; she has no interest in being defiled or overtaken by it. Given white dolls for Christmas, she destroys them. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls.
The indifference with which I could have axed them was shaken only by my desire to do so. Pecola has no fight in her. Outdoors was the end of something, an irrevocable, physical fact, defining and complementing our metaphysical condition. Eventually, the Breedloves are reunited in a storefront. The three women who live above the Breedloves, prostitutes named China, Poland, and Miss Marie, have formed a kind of family.
Where your socks? China chuckled.
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