toni morrison
...aduated with honors in 1949 from Lorain High School. Morrison then attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., Americas most distinguished black college. At Howard she majored in English and got her minor in classics. Morrison changed her name, to Toni a shortened version of her middle name because it seemed many people had trouble pronouncing Chloe. She was very disappointed with many of her peers at Howard, because the seemed to be there more to get wealthy and socialize. At Howard she joined a Theater group called the Howard University Players. The Theater group made many tours of the south where she saw the reason her parents had moved north. Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953. She then attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Morrison wrote her thesis on suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, receiving her Master’s degree in English in 1955. After graduating she took a job at Texas Southern University in Houston and taught introductory English. At Texas Southern she learned about black history and learned to see it as an acceptable discipline and not something to do just to see where you come from. Two years after she began working at Texas Southern she went back to Howard this time as a professor. At Howard she meet some very prominent figures of the civil rights movement, including Marin Luther King and Stokey Carmichael the future leader of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. At Howard she also met her future, husband Harold Morrison a Jamaican architect. They were married in 1958 and had their first child a son, Harold Ford in 1961. She continued to teach at Howard and take care of her family she also joined a small writers group. Toni Morrison was unhappily married and saw the writers group as an escape from that unpleasantness. She later said of her marriage and writing that she “had no will, no judgment, no perspective, no power, no authority, no self – just this brutal sense of irony, melancholy, and a trembling respect for words.” She said I wrote like someone with a dirty habit. Secretly. Compulsively. Slyly.” She wanted to be surrounded by people that respected literature. Each member of the literature group was required to bring in a piece of writing. One of the piece’s Morrison brought in was a story based on a girl she remembered from her childhood who prayed for beautiful blue eyes. The piece was very well received. She soon left Harold Morrison and moved back in with her parents and her two sons. Morrison received a job with a subsidiary of Random House located in Syracuse, New York in 1964. Her two joys then were playing with her sons when she was done with work and writing when they were asleep. She had continued to work on her first novel a continuation of her story that received the most praise from her writing group. She was transferred to New York city to work as a senior editor for Random House. There she edited the books of many well known black Americans including Muhammad Ali. While editing Morrison kept sending out her novel to various publishers. In 1971 The Bluest Eye was published by Holt. Even though the book was not a commercial success it established Morrison as major literary figure. In 1971 she became associate professor of English at the State University of New York and continued her work at Random House. Her second novel was about two black women who were friends and there community of Medallion, Ohio. The book was named Sula and it was published in 1973 it won the National Book Critics Award and was nominated for the National Book Award in fiction in 1975. In 1976 Morrison began work as a visiting lecturer at Yale University in New Haven Connecticut. She ...