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This article relates to The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison is the author of 11 works of fiction as well as a number of books and essays. She's best known for her novel Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 (the first Black woman to win the award) and was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the highest civilian honor of the United States — by Barack Obama in 2012.
Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, the daughter of working-class parents. At the age of 12, she became a member of the Roman Catholic church and took "Anthony" as her confirmation name (for St. Anthony of Padua, patron saint of the poor). This led to her lifelong nickname, "Toni." She graduated from Howard University in 1953, with a BA in English, followed by a master's from Cornell in American Literature in 1955. After teaching for a couple of years in Texas, she returned to Howard as a professor, and it was there that she met her husband, Harold Morrison, with whom she had two children. Following their divorce in 1964, she moved to New York to work in the publishing industry, becoming the first Black woman fiction editor in Random House's history in the late 1960s. In 1983 she left Random House, after which she taught writing at the State University of New York before joining the faculty at Princeton University in 1989. She retired in 2006 but continued to write and lecture until her death in 2019.
The Bluest Eye was Morrison's first novel and had its genesis in an elementary school incident. A classmate said that she wanted to have blue eyes, her implication being that blue eyes were beautiful, while her own brown eyes were not. The statement made an impression on Morrison, who never forgot what she felt was an indication of self-loathing. She crafted the occurrence into a short story while at Howard, and shared it with others in her writing group.
When Morrison arrived in New York in the 1960s she was newly divorced, had two young children, and had just started a new job. "In short," she told one interviewer, "I was miserable." A lifelong reader, Morrison had always turned to books for escape and solace, but she couldn't find the book she wanted to read. She was searching for a story that echoed her own ("I wanted to read about people like me: people who were Black, and were young, and had lived in the Midwest") only to discover that if this demographic appeared in literature at all it was in a minor role, never as the protagonist. So she started writing what would become The Bluest Eye.
Morrison's process was to get up at 4:00 AM each day, before her children were awake, and to start writing as soon as the coffee kicked in. The book took five years of constant work and revision before she felt it was ready for publication.
There's no record of how many times The Bluest Eye was rejected, but Morrison has said it was refused over and over again before finding a home with a small publishing house, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston (later Holt McDougal). Its first publishing run, in 1970, was somewhere around just 1500 copies. Although it did receive a positive review from the New York Times, the work was largely ignored and sales lagged. When Morrison's second novel, Sula, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1975, this sparked interest in her first book.
The Bluest Eye has now long been recognized as a classic. It has been banned from many United States schools, often ostensibly because of its depiction of child sexual abuse. Other cited reasons include "offensive language" and "sexually explicit" scenes. There are a great many books with content like this that remain on school shelves, though, and it's well established that books about Black people's experiences are disproportionately challenged. As Morrison found when sitting down to write the novel, Black lives are seriously underrepresented in literature, and bans such as these only perpetuate the issue.
Photo portrait of Toni Morrison for the first-edition back cover of The Bluest Eye (1970)
Original by Bert Andrews, retouched version obtained via Wikimedia Commons
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This article relates to The Bluest Eye.
It first ran in the January 29, 2025
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