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Chloe Anthony Wofford was born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, a small steel town. She was the second of the four children of George Wofford, a ship welder, and his wife, Ramah, a homemaker. Like many families in the midst of the Depression, Morrison’s parents struggled proudly to feed and clothe their family. Though they differed in their views on race -- her mother steadfastly believed racial relations would improve with the economy, while her father distrusted "every word and every gesture of every white man on earth" -- the Woffords instilled in their children a firm belief in the importance of building self-reliance and looking to the community as a means of support and aid during hard times. Although she attended a multi-racial school, Chloe Wofford grew up with "more than a child’s contempt for white people." After graduating from high school with honors, Morrison enrolled at the all-black Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she became known as Toni, and where she became involved in campus theater productions. After receiving her B.A. in 1953, she continued on to Cornell to pursue graduate work in English. There, she completed a thesis on the theme of suicide in the works of Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. Masters degree in hand, Toni returned to Howard University where she took a position teaching English, and where she met and married Jamaican architect Harold Morrison. The couple had two sons before their marriage crumbled. Morrison found solace from the unhappy union in a small group of poets and writers who met informally to discuss their work. It was in this setting that her creative instincts began to stir. A short story she "dashed off" about a little black girl who wanted blue eyes would be her first completed literary work, and the seed of her first novel, The Bluest Eye. More...

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