Chloe Anthony Wofford, better known as Toni Morrison to the literary world, has written many novels in her time between 1970 and 1990. Many of Toni Morrison’s themes and subjects are good and evil, love, hate, friendship, beauty and ugliness, and death. Toni Morrison’s novels and poems can be analyzed in regard to two important literary elements, which are theme and symbolism.
Toni Morrison’s writing is affected by her upbringing in Georgia where sharecropping and racial violence were extremely prevalent and by embracing her heritage as a child through African folklore, music, rituals, and myths, where her family was intimate with the supernatural. Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, a small town in Ohio in 1931. Her birth parents are Ramah and George Wafford. Toni received her Bachelors Degree from Howard University in English and shortly after that; Morrison went back to college to receive her Master’s Degree in English from Cornell University. Later after Morrison married and had two sons, she began working in New York as a textbook editor for a subsidiary of Random House. She began to have more and more free time in the evenings; this environment helped her turn to writing novels. Morrison has received many awards and recognition for her novels. To this day, Morrison is still writing, enjoying life and has recently written a letter to President Obama regarding endorsing him.
The novel Bluest Eye has an interesting structure. The setting takes place in Lorain, Ohio in the year 1940-1941. Pecola Breedlove is main character of the novel, an eleven-year-old black girl who believes that she is ugly because of her skin color and believes that having blue eyes will solve all of her problems, and throughout the story suffers the ...
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Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo. "Order and Disorder in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye." EXPLORING Novels. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Gale Power Search. Web. 7 Feb. 2012.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|EJ2111200558
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SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on The Bluest Eye.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2002. Web. 15 Feb. 2012.
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"Toni Morrison." Encyclopedia of World Biography. 2nd ed. Vol. 11. Detroit: Gale, 2004. 188-190. Gale Power Search. Web. 7 Feb. 2012.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|CX3404704596
The major characters in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison were Pecola Breedlove, Cholly Breedlove, Claudia Mac...
Ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Library of America, 1998. 63-84.
Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago and grew up in Illinois, the only girl in a family of seven. Cisneros is noted for her collection of poems and books that concentrate on the Chicana experience in the United States. In her writing, Cisneros explores and transcends borders of location, ethnicity, gender and language. Cisneros writes in lyrical yet deceptively simple language, she makes the invisible visible by centering on the lives of Chicanas, their relationships with their families, their religion, their art, and their politics. Toni Morrison, born as Chloe Anthony Wofford in Ohio in 1931 changed her name because it was hard for people to pronounce it. She was the second of four children, and both of her parents migrated from the South. Morrison is best noted for her novels, short fiction, being a lecturer, teacher and public servant. She writes using deft language and her lyrical writing, exploring the African-American middle classes and folk culture.
The cast. Slavery in the civil war and the African American struggle throughout history influences Beloved’s author throughout her works. Born in Lorain, Ohio on February 18, 1931, Chloe Anthony Wofford became one of the most influential and inspiring authors of the century. The second child of four, Chloe was extremely independent and eventually changed her name to Toni. After leaving home, she attended Howard University and Cornell University where she earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English and a Master of Arts Degree, respectively. Marrying Harold Morrison in 1958 brought great joy to Morrison, but they divorced in 1964. From that relationship, she was blessed with two beautiful children, Harold and Slade. She often uses her sons’ names in her works, such as Harold’s in Beloved. Morrison has written 7 novels, including The Bluest Eye, Beloved, and her last novel to date, Love. The Pulitzer Prize was awarded to Morrison for Beloved, as well as the Anisfield-Wolf book Award in Race Relations in 1988. Morrison also received the American Book Award in 1988 making Beloved one of her most decorated novels. Breaking many barriers in the art field, the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature was bestowed on Morrison. This established her as the first African American to win the Award. Beloved is her most acknowledged novel across the country, and was rated one of the New York Times best novels of the past 25 years.
Born in San Francisco, in the year of 1916, Shirley Jackson had an inauspicious entrance to the world, despite the chilling nature of her writing. She moved two years after she was born to Burlingame, California, where she resided for most of her childhood. When she was 17, she began to attend the University of Rochester, she only spent a year there, as after a time of questioning her friend’s loyalty and long periods of unhappiness, she left the school for a year, practicing writing almost religiously, with a minimum of one thousand words every day. In 1937, she entered Syracuse University, at first pursuing a degree in journalism before transferring to the English department.
Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye provides social commentary on a lesser known portion of black society in America. The protagonist Pecola is a young black girl who desperately wants to feel beautiful and gain the “bluest eyes” as the title references.
Morrison studied humanities at Howard and Cornell Universities. She pursued an academic career at Texas Southern University and Yale. She has had a chair at Princeton University since 1989. During these years she has also worked as an editor at Random House, a literary critic, and she has written and given many lectures focusing on African-American literature. Morrison's maternal and paternal influences greatly affected her outlook on life and this influence is palpable in her works and their characters and themes. From her father she learned to distrust whites and that she merited self-worth despite the white opinion of those of the black race "She readily admits: My father was a racist. As a child in ...
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
Toni Morrison graduated with honors from Lorain High School. She went to Howard University where she majored in English Literature. While at Howard, she changed her name from Chloe to Toni. Toni Morrison went to graduate school at Cornell University. She earned a Bachelor’s degree from Howard and a Master’s degree from Cornell.
Thesis: In Beloved, Toni Morrison talks about family life, mother-daughter relationships, and the psychological impact from slavery.
Toni Morrison novel, Beloved originated from a nineteenth-century newspaper article that she read while doing research in 1974. The article was about a runaway slave named Margaret Garner, who had run away with her four small children sometime in 1856 from a plantation in Kentucky. She traveled the Underground Railroad, to Ohio, where she lived with her mother-in-law. When her Kentucky owner arrived in Ohio to take Margaret and the four children back to the plantation, she tried to murder her children and herself. She managed to kill her two year-old daughter and severely injure the remaining three children before she was arrested and jailed.
Margaret Walker was born on July 7, 1915 in Birmingham, Alabama to Reverend Sigismund C. Walker and Marion Dozier Walker (Gates and McKay 1619). Her father, a scholarly Methodist minister, passed onto her his passion for literature. Her mother, a music teacher, gifted her with an innate sense of rhythm through music and storytelling. Her parents not only provided a supportive environment throughout her childhood but also emphasized the values of education, religion, and black culture. Much of Walker’s ability to realistically write about African American life can be traced back to her early exposure to her black heritage. Born in Alabama, she was deeply influenced by the Harlem Renaissance and received personal encouragement from Langston Hughes. During the Depression, she worked for the WPA Federal Writers Project and assists Richard Wright, becoming his close friend and later, biographer. In 1942, she was the first African American to win the Yale Younger Poets award for her poem For My People (Gates and McKay 1619). Her publishing career halted for...
In Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, Morrison uses universal themes and characters that anyone can relate to today. Set in the 1800s, Beloved is about the destructive effects of American slavery. Most destructive in the novel, however, is the impact of slavery on the human soul. Morrison’s Beloved highlights how slavery contributes to the destruction of one’s identity by examining the importance of community solidarity, as well as the powers and limits of language during the 1860s.
A reader might easily conclude that the most prominent social issue presented in The Bluest Eye is that of racism, but more important issues lie beneath the surface. Pecola experiences damage from her abusive and negligent parents. The reader is told that even Pecola's mother thought she was ugly from the time of birth. Pecola's negativity may have initially been caused by her family's failure to provide her with identity, love, security, and socialization, ail which are essential for any child's development (Samuels 13). Pecola's parents are able only to give her a childhood of limited possibilities. She struggles to find herself in infertile soil, leading to the analysis of a life of sterility (13). Like the marigolds planted that year, Pecola never grew.
Toni Morrison born Chloe Walker was born in Lorain, Ohio in 1931. In 1949, after graduating from Lorain high school, Morrison attended Howard University. Where she majored in English and minored in classics, also while attending Howard University Morrison was an active socialite. By 1954 Morrison graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Upon graduation Morrison devoted her time to teaching at prestigious universities such as Yale, Princeton, Howard and Southern University. After her years of teaching Morrison decided to focus her passion on writing. With her literary work Morrison’s works has become a blue print for young black writers