Today is the 80th birthday of Toni Morrison!

Today (Feb. 18, 2011) is the 80th birthday of novelist Toni Morrison, born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio (1931). Both of her parents had moved up from the South, seeking a better life. In Lorain, her family moved around a lot, often living in tiny apartments above grocery stores. They didn't live in a black neighborhood so much as a poor one, filled with immigrants from all over the world. Despite the poverty, she said: 'My parents made all of us feel as though there were these rather extraordinary deserving people within us. I felt like an aristocrat -- or what I think an aristocrat is.' Her mother -- Who came from a family of musicians -- sang while she did chores, everything from opera arias to the blues. Her parents told her ghost stories and folklore and stories of life in the South, and they encouraged her to read everything -- she devoured Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Leo Tolstoy. And she listened to the radio. She said: 'I was a radio child. You get in the habit of gathering information that way, and imagining the rest. You make it up. It was horrible to see pictures of Hamlet and Cinderella -- it was awful. I hate to see pictures of my characters, good or bad -- although I always compliment the artists.'

She went to Howard University and then to Cornell for graduate school. She got a teaching job at Texas Southern University, and then at Howard, where she met a Jamaican architect named Harold Morrison. They fell in love, got married, and had a son named Ford. She kept teaching part time, but mostly stayed home and cared for her son. Her marriage started to unravel -- she and her husband realized they didn't have much in common. She missed being able to talk about literature with someone. Feeling bored and isolated, she joined a writing group. She brought in some of her more academic work, but then she ran out of that, and it was her turn to bring in a piece. So she wrote a quick draft of a short story about a young black girl who wanted blue eyes. Everyone thought it was great.
When she got divorced, she had a three-year-old son and another on the way. She went home to Lorain for a while, then accepted a job as an editor with a division of Random House. She was working full time and caring for two young sons, but she decided to work on a novel on top of everything else. She said: 'I was in a place where I knew I was not going to be for a long time; I didn't have any friends and didn't make any, didn't want any because I was on my way somewhere else. So I wrote as a thing to do. If I had played the piano, I think I would have done that -- but I didn't have a piano and don't play. So I wrote.' She expanded on the story she had written for her writing group. She said: 'I was quite content to be the only reader. I thought that everything that needed to be written had been written; there was so much. I am not being facetious when I say I wrote The Bluest Eye in order to read it. And I think that is what makes the difference, because I could look at it as a reader, really as a reader, and not as my own work. And then I could say, 'This doesn't make me feel right,' and I could change it. That's what I mean by the distance. People always say that to be a good writer you have to read; that sounds like they're collecting ideas and information. But what it ought to mean is that you have to be able to read what you write critically. And with distance. And surrender to it and know the problems and not get all fraught.'
She published The Bluest Eye in 1970. By the time it was published, she had already started working on her second novel, Sula (1973). She has been writing ever since, and her novels include Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987), and most recently, A Mercy (2008). She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
A Mercy begins: 'Don't be afraid. My telling can't hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark -- weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more -- but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth. I explain. You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog's profile plays in the steam of a kettle. Or when a corn-husk doll sitting on a shelf is soon splaying in the corner of a room and the wicked of how it got there is plain. Stranger things happen all the time everywhere. You know. I know you know.'
Toni Morrison said: 'I read all the reviews of my work, collect them in fact. I am very interested in the responses I get to my work, not only because it reflects my own work's reception, but also because it reflects the way in which women's and African-American literature is received and discussed.'
And, 'The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing. It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects. But the downside is very small compared to the upside.'
And, 'My books are always questions for me. What if? How does it feel to ...? Or what would it look like if you took racism out? Or what does it look like if you have the perfect town, everything you ever wanted? And so you ask a question, put it in a time when it would be theatrical to ask, and find the people who can articulate it for you and try to make them interesting. The rest of it is all structure, how to put it together.'