A Distinctive and Distinguished Literary Profile - Paving Toni Morrison's Way in American Letters

Toni Morrison, one of the most renowned black writers from the United States of America with numerous honors to her credit such as the Nobel Prize for literature, a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Beloved and the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, is widely recognized as one of the most significant novelists of the twentieth century. Her novels are therefore taught widely world-wide in Literature, History, Women Studies and African American Studies programs.

Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, published in 1970 told the story of a young African-American girl who believes her incredibly difficult life would be bettered if only she had blue eyes. She has continued to explore the African-American experience in its many forms and periods in such works as Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977 which sold 3 million copies and was on the New York Times best seller list for 16 weeks and re-emerged on the best seller list in 1996 when it was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for inclusion in Oprah's Book Club and her fifth novel Beloved (1987), about the legacy of slavery, thus developing a strong following among both readers and critics who fell for her lyrical style, sharp observations, and vibrant storytelling.

She made her debut as a novelist in 1970 and soon gained the attention of both critics and a wider audience for her epic themes, her unerring ear for vividly expressive dialogue fusing the rhythms of African American speech patterns and music with other literary influences thus creating an entirely new discourse, and her poetically-charged and richly-expressive depictions of Black American life and experience through richly detailed portrayals of black characters. Their central themes are the black American experience; in an unjust society within which situation her characters keep struggling to find themselves and their cultural identity in a society that warps or impedes such essential growth.  Morrison examines particularly black female experience within the black community often exploring the experiences and roles of black women in a racist and male dominated society. In the center of her complex and multi-layered narratives is the unique cultural inheritance of African-Americans. 

Her use of fantasy, her sinuous poetic style, and her rich interweaving of the mythic gave her stories great strength and texture. According to Charles Larson in the Chicago Tribune "Book World", each of Morrison's novels "is as original as anything that has appeared in our literature in the last 20 years. The contemporaneity that unites them - the troubling persistence of racism in America - is infused with an urgency that only a black writer can have about our society. "She has in all her works captured what she calls "Black people's grace" which "has been what they do with language."

Toni Morrison has thus earned a reputation as a gifted storyteller revising the geography associated with African American literature with her works taking place in mid-western black villages rather than in the traditional settings of the urban North and the rural South.

Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), set primarily in Lorain, Ohio, is a novel of initiation concerning a victimized adolescent black girl who obsessed by white standards of beauty, longs to have blue eyes. 

Her second novel, Sula, published in 1973 and set in Medallion, Ohio examines (among other issues) the dynamics of friendship and the expectations for conformity within the community. 

The critically acclaimed Beloved (1987) based on the true story of a runaway slave who, at the point of recapture, kills her infant daughter in order to spare her a life of slavery, which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is set in post-Civil War Ohio. 

Ohio is central in her work not only because she was born there or because it was one of the major stations on the Underground Railroad but also because it represents "an escape from stereotyped black settings...being neither plantation nor ghetto." However, since Morrison's parents were migrants from the South, her works exhibit much southern heritage influences as well. This is seen especially in its major theme of African-American displacement - first from Africa, then from the South to North - and what African Americans have made of their frequent moves. 

In every one of her novels, a protagonist physically leaves home to learn about his or her interior life and how that life connects to a larger community. Growing up, Morrison experienced a vibrant African American migrant culture as a result developing an appreciation for her southern black roots, unlike Richard Wright.