Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18th, 1931, in the small town of Lorain, Ohio. She was the second born of her four siblings that her mother, Ramah Willis, and father, George Wofford, had. Morrison grew up during the Great Depression, which had begun in 1929. Growing up, Morrison heard stories about the violence that took place against African Americans. Both sets of Morrison’s grandparents were a part of the “Great Migration”, which took place during the early 1900s. Her maternal grandparents left the city of Greenville, Alabama, in 1910 due to the loss of their farm. As for her paternal family, they left Georgia and headed north the same year as her maternal family to escape sharecropping. Chloe’s childhood was filled with African American Folklore, music, rituals and myths. Like Morrison’s grandmother, Willis for example, would keep a dream journal which she tried to decode each dream symbol into winning numbers. Throughout her childhood her father and grandmother helped develop a love of storytelling. She would mainly hear about the violence that took place against the African Americans, but Chloe’s mother warned her against the hatred of whites. During her early education, she went to an integrated school. She was the only African American student in her first grade class, but was still one of the best students in her class. Her success in school would not stop! She excelled in high school where she graduated with honors from Lorain High School in 1949. She then went on to Howard University in Washington DC, where she majored in English, and continued to succeed academically. During her time at Howard, she then changed her name to “Toni” because many people were not able to pronounce her actual name. C...
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...by others across the world for her literary contributions! For those who have't heard of her, they need to wake up from that rock they're under and get to know Toni Morrison the legend!
Works Cited
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Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917. She grew up in a harsh, racist time period along with The Great Depression. Brooks’ poems were influenced from this and encouraged her to write many poems about the life of a black American. “She was inspired by the black power movement and the militancy of such poets as Amiri Baraka” (Barker, 448). During the 1960s her writing underwent a racial change in style and subject matter. Brooks learned to write such great poems at the Associate of Literature and Art, Wilson Junior College, 1936. Writing many known poems such as: A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen, Maud Martha, Bronzeville Boys and Girls, The Bean Eaters, etc. She’s a poet of contemporary writings; her poems mirror the ups and the downs of black American lives at this time. Although she writes with great encouragement and wisdom, she looks at everything with an open mind. Her characters speak for themselves. “Her works sometimes resembled a poignant social document, but her poems are works of art…” (Miller, 78). One can picture a vivid idea of Bronzeville, U.S.A. because of the great details she puts into her poems. A black district in her native Chicago, that serves as the setting for many of her poems. “Her characters are usually the unheroic black people who fled the land for the city- only to d...
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge. Harvard University Press, 1992.
Wyatt, Jean. “Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” PMLA, Vol. 108, No.3 (May, 1993): 474-488. JSTOR. Web. 27. Oct. 2015.
Toni Morrison does not use any words she doesn’t need to. She narrates the story plainly and simply, with just a touch of bleak sadness. Her language has an uncommon power because of this; her matter-of-factness makes her story seem more real. The shocking unexpectedness of the one-sentence anecdotes she includes makes the reader think about what she says. With this unusual style, Morrison’s novel has an enthralling intensity that is found in few other places
Mobley, Marilyn Sanders. “ Toni Morrison.” The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Eds. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith, and Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.508-510.
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