Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison's was born Chloe Anthony Wofford, in Lorain, Ohio on February 18, 1931. She is the daughter of George and Ramah Wofford, and is the second of four children. She married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, in 1958 and was divorced in 1964. She has two children; they are named Harold Ford and Slade Kevin. She obtained a Bachelor of Arts in English at Howard University in 1953. Later in 1955 she received her Master of Arts at Cornell University. She taught English at countless universities and schools, including: Texas Southern University, Houston, Howard University, Washington, DC, State University of New York at Purchase, State University of New York at Albany.

In Sula, Morrison's 1973 novel, the author presents a pair of black women who must come to terms with their lives. Set in a Midwestern black community called The Bottom, the story follows two friends, Sula and Nel, from childhood to old age and death. Sula is a tale of rebel and conformist in which the conformity is dictated by the solid inhabitants of The Bottom and even the rebellion gains strength from the community's disapproval. Another of her novels, Song of Solomon, was about this sort of political problem that young adults have, which is trying to combine upward mobility--middle-class, bourgeois, upward mobility--with some kind of respect and reverence for their ancestors. Morrison said "There's always this conflict, as though if you go to college, you can't go back to Lorain, Ohio; or if you stay in Lorain, Ohio, you have to despise everybody who went on. Not quite that simple, but you understand what that tension is. So I was trying to figure out how somebody who's in his late 20s or 30s got educated and what would help inform him to learn how to be a complete human being, without these conflicts, without these self-destructive impulses for material things."

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