Toni Morrison was born on 18 February 1931. She was born Chloe Anthony Wofford. She gained the nickname Toni during her university years; Morrison is her married name. She was born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, where her grandparents had migrated from the south.
Morrison attended Howard University in Washington D.C., and graduated with a BA in English, minor in Classics in 1953. She then went on to do an MA in English at Cornell University. Between 1965 and 1968 she was an editor at Random House, and then began her academic career as a lecturer. It was at the beginning of her academic career that she began to think about Black culture as an academic discipline. In 1989 she was made Robert Goheen Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.
Her first novel, The Bluest Eye appeared in 1970. This was the beginning of a distinguished career as an author. Three more novels were to follow – Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977) and Tar Baby (1981) – before she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Beloved (1987). In 1992, her next novel, Jazz, also received popular success and critical acclaim, but it was the groundbreaking essay, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) that brought Morrison to the pinnacle of her career as both a writer and critic. The following year she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Morrison's fiction engages with questions of history, memory and trauma of the African-American past. The trilogy of Beloved, Jazz and Paradise (1988) all retrace moments in Black-American history from slavery through to the 1920s, and then to the 1970s. Morrison uses the power of language, narrative and imagination to recast Black presence in American history and fill in the gaps. However, her fiction also implies the impossibility of restoration or redemption.
Playing in the Dark puts forward Morrison's view that “Americanness” depends on whiteness, the suppression of the Other and the forgetting of America's Black history. She also shows how race informs the reading and writing of literature, using canonical American literature such as Herman Melville's Moby Dick to illustrate her point. However, “black” and “white” are used generate particular meanings in all literatures.
In all her work she is concerned with the construction of Black identity. Her early novels deal with this through individual realities, and have been noted for their modernist subject matter, plot and technique. Her later novels veer towards the postmodern with their concern with pluralities and the political. Her work has been studied from a variety of critical perspectives, but most particularly postcolonial and Black feminist approaches are applied to interpreting her work.