Introduction
Toni Morrison
See also Toni Morrison Criticism (Volume 4), and Volumes 10, 22, 194.
Chronology
| 1931: | Chloe Anthony Wofford (Toni Morrison) is born on 18 February in Lorain, Ohio, the second of four children of George Wofford, a shipyard welder, and Ramah Willis Wofford. |
| 1949: | Morrison graduates with honors from Lorain High School. She enrolls at Howard University in Washington, D.C. |
| 1953: | Morrison graduates from Howard University with a B.A. in English and a minor in Classics. She begins graduate study at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. |
| 1955: | Morrison receives an M.A. in English literature from Cornell University. She begins teaching at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas. |
| 1957: | Morrison leaves Texas Southern. She joins the faculty at Howard University. |
| 1958: | Morrison marries Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect. |
| 1961: | Morrison gives birth to her first son, Harold Ford. |
| 1962: | Morrison joins a writer’s group. She writes a short story that she later develops into the novel titled The Bluest Eye (1970). |
| 1964: | Morrison visits Paris. She and Harold Morrison are divorced. She returns to Lorain, Ohio, where her son Slade is born. Morrison leaves Howard. |
| 1965: | Morrison leaves Ohio with her children for Syracuse, New York, to take a job as an assistant editor with a textbook subsidiary of Random House. While there, she works on The Bluest Eye. |
| 1967: | Morrison transfers to the trade-book division of Random House in New York City. Over the course of her twenty-year career as an editor for Random House, she works with many African American writers, including Leon Forrest, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Henry Dumas. |
| 1970: | Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, is published. |
| 1971: | Morrison teaches English for a year at the State University of New York at Purchase while continuing to work at Random House. |
| 1973: | Sula is published. |
| 1974: | Morrison edits The Black Book. |
| 1975: | Sula is nominated for the National Book Award in fiction. |
| 1976: | Morrison spends a year at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, as a visiting lecturer. |
| 1977: | Song of Solomon is published and is a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. It wins the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. |
| 1980: | Morrison is named Distinguished Writer by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is appointed to the National Council on the Arts by President Jimmy Carter. |
| 1981: | Tar Baby is published; Morrison is featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine. She is elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Writers Guild, and the Authors’ League. |
| 1984: | Morrison leaves Random House. She is named Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at the State University of New York at Albany. |
| 1986: | Morrison’s first play, Dreaming Emmett, is performed on 4 January by the Capital Repertory Theater of Albany at the Marketplace Theater in Albany, New York. Morrison becomes a visiting lecturer at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. |
| 1987: | Beloved is published. Morrison is appointed to the Helsinki Watch Committee and to the Board of Trustees of the New York Public Library. She chairs the New York State Education Department’s Committee on Adult Literacy and is Regents Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. |
| 1988: | Beloved wins the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, the Robert E Kennedy Book Award, and the Melcher Book Award. Morrison’s visiting lectureship at Bard College ends. |
| 1989: | Morrison is named Robert E Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University, thus becoming the first African American woman to hold a named chair at an Ivy League university. She receives the Modern Language Association of America Commonwealth Award in literature and the Chianti Ruffino Antico Fattore International Award in literature. |
| 1992: | Jazz is published and makes The New York Times best-seller list; Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, a collection of Morrison’s essays, is published. Morrison edits Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. Honey and Rue, an operatic piece with music by Andre Previn and words by Morrison, is performed at Carnegie Hall in January 1992, featuring soprano Kathleen Battle. |
| 1993: | Morrison wins the Nobel Prize in literature, the eighth woman and the first African American woman to be so honored. She receives the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Award from the National Organization for Women. Morrison’s house on the Hudson River north of New York City burns to the ground on Christmas Day. |
| 1994: | Morrison receives the Condorcet Medal and the Pearl S. Buck Award. |
| 1995: | Morrison collaborates with drummer Max Roach and choreographer Bill T. Jones on Degga, a performance piece for the Lincoln Center Serious Fun “American Visionaries” Summer Festival. She receives an honorary doctorate from Howard University on 3 March. The Lorain Public Library in Lorain, Ohio, dedicates a library reading room in her honor. |
| 1996: | Morrison wins the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The Dancing Mind: Speech upon Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters on the Sixth of November, Nineteen Hundred and Ninety-Six, Momson’s National Book Award speech, is published. Talk-show host Oprah Winfrey selects Song of Solomon as the second offering of her book club, resulting in one million copies of the book being sold and a 25 percent increase in sales of her other novels. |
| 1997: | Morrison edits Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the 0. J. Simpson Case with Claudia Brodsky Lacour. |
| 1998: | Paradise is published. Winfrey selects it for her book club. Winfrey, also produces a film version of Beloved, directed by Jonathan Demme. |
| 1999: | Morrison’s first children’s picture book, The Big Box, which she wrote with her son Slade, is published. |
| 2000: | The Bluest Eye is selected for Winfrey’s book club. Morrison receives the National Humanities Medal. |
| 2001: | Morrison becomes the fifth recipient of the Enoch Pratt Society Lifetime Achievement Award. |
| 2002: | Sula is the forty-eighth and final selection for Winfrey’s book club. |
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.