Toni Morrison
Essay Preview: Toni Morrison
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It is not unusual for writers to use pseudonyms or for people to change their names however there are many out there who would be surprised to know that the author commonly known as Toni Morrison was actually born with another name. Toni Morrisons birth name is actually Chloe Anthony Wofford and she was born on the 18th of February 1931. She comes from a reasonably sized family and has three other siblings. For a young woman who came from very humble beginnings, her father being a shipyard welder, Ms. Morrison rose to ranks that neither she nor her family and friends could ever had imagined. No one could have imagined that a small gathering of individuals at Howard University to share their lover of writing would evolve into a career that has spanned over forty years.
Toni Morrison came to the meeting with a short story about a girl of color who desired to have eyes of a girl who belonged to a different race; she wanted her eyes to be blue. I can only assume that her piece was given great reviews by her many of her peers as this would later be the first novel that she would elongate and then publish. It was either this or an instinctive gut feeling that told her that this short writing could be something special if made longer, so with a job and two children to raise Toni Morrison did just that, completing it in 1970. This very same book would then go on to be selected by the Queen of Talk Shows, Oprah Winfrey, as a must read and introduced to millions via television when selected for her book club. Toni would later on go on to write other books that were equally good and brought her international acclaim. One of the books that I personally became extremely familiar with is Beloved. This book would be written almost seventeen years after her first introduction into the literary world with the Bluest Eyes. That book would later on be made into a movie starring Danny Glover as well as Oprah Winfrey. The books that have partly contributed to her being nominated for some of these awards include Bluest Eyes, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Sula.
During her career Toni Morrison achieved many acclaims including, but not limited to, several National Book Awards, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, the Noble Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, The New York Times Book Review, the Jefferson Lecture, and the National Book Foundations Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters just to mention a few. This is quite an achievement for any author but more importantly an African-American woman, whose novels tend to focus on women or more specifically black women. It is for this reason that I sometimes wonder if her 1987 novel Beloved inability to win an award wasnt due to one or more of these factors. This slight by the literary world was not unnoticed by her contemporaries who were well aware of the national attention that the book had been received.
This small moment where notoriety did not occur validates some of the very issues that Morrison tend to talk about in one of her major works, the Bluest Eyes and the focus of this paper. As stated before this book started out as a very small idea that was shared with a few colleagues and friends and would later become the first of several novels and catapulted the career of Toni Morrison into that of an acclaimed author. I remember reading this book in high school and not fully understanding many of the social issues that the author was trying to bring to light into her writing. The second time around I selected this book not only because of the title and slight familiarity with the title but also because the cover of the book continues to intrigue me. Over the years I had become more familiar with Toni Morrison because of the book and movie Beloved and I knew that she tend to focus on African-American characters in her books. So I asked myself why the Bluest Eyes as a title? I came to the conclusion and remembered from my first reading of the novel that it had to be about a person who thought it would be more socially acceptable and beneficial for her to have blue eyes. Maybe then she would not be in the social class that she finds herself in. I also remembered the documentary of where several black children were given black dolls and white dolls to chose from to see what their preference would be and why. The majority of time the children chose the white doll because they perceived them to be prettier.