February 18 is the birthday of Princeton University professor emerita and bestselling novelist Toni Morrison, born Chloe Wofford, in Lorain, Ohio (1931). Lorain was a steel town. Her father worked at the steel mill and in construction, and her mother raised the kids. Morrison said about her mother: "When an eviction notice was put on our house, she tore it off. If there were maggots in our flour, she wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt. My mother believed something should be done about inhuman situations."
Morrison went to college, got interested in theater and traveled around in an acting troupe, then went on to get a master's in English. She loved to read, but had never been a writer except for a few stories in high school. But after she got married and had two children, her marriage started to dissolve, and she needed an escape. She joined a writing group, but after she had workshopped her stories from high school, she was out of things to share, so she wrote a story about a black girl who wanted blue eyes. And then she started to expand it into a novel called, The Bluest Eye (1969).
Morrison went on to write eight more novels, including Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987), and most recently, Home (2012). She was the first African-American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in literature (1993).
CURRENT listing of this novelist's work as of Feb. 2013: "Writer's Almanac" American Public Media / Garrison Keillor
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