contributed to her character choice, themes in her novel and how she views white people. Her father was the main contributor towards her outlook on whites.
The songs and stories of Chloe Wofford's childhood undoubtedly influenced her later work. Toni Morrison's oeuvre draws heavily upon the oral art forms of African Americans. Toni Morrison's writing was also greatly influenced by her family. Her grandparents had relocated from to Ohio during the national movement of blacks out of the South known as the Great Migration. Her mother's parents, Aredelia and John Solomon Willis, after leaving their farm in Alabama, moved to Kentucky, and then to Ohio. They placed extreme value in the education of their children and themselves. John Willis taught himself to read and his stories became inspiration for Morrison's Song of Solomon. Inevitably, however, she began to experience racial discrimination as she and her peers grew older. It was also during this time that she wrote the short story that would become the basis for her first novel, The Bluest Eyes. Song of Solomon was published in 1977 and enjoyed both commercial and critical success. In 1981, Morrison published Tar Baby a novel focusing on a stormy relationship
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Her use of shifting perspective, fragmentary narrative, and a narrative voice extremely close to the consciousness of her characters reveals the influence of writers like Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner: two writers that Morrison, not coincidentally, studied extensively while a college student. All of her work also shows the influence of African-American folklore, songs, and women's gossip. In her attempts to map these oral art forms onto literary modes of representation, Morrison has created a body of work informed by a distinctly black sensibility while drawing a reading audience from across racial