Toni Morrison Impact On African American Literature

Beginning in the 1970s, African - American literature reached the mainstream as books by Black writers continually achieved best- selling and award – winning status. This was also the time when the work of African American writers began to be accepted academia as a legitimate genre of American literature. As a part of the larger Black Arts movement, which was inspired by the Civil Rights and Black power movements, African – American literature began to be defined and analyzed. A number of scholars and writers are generally credited with helping to promote and define African –American literature as a genre during this time period, including fiction writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and poet James Emanuel who took a major step toward

She broke the barriers of black women and the Swedish Academy awarded her with the Nobel Prize for literature in 1996. Toni Morrison 's original name was Chloe Anthony Wofford. She was born on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio which was located in the United States. She was born to Ramah, and George Wofford and also the second of four children in a working class family .As a child Morrison reads fervently and her favorite authors were Jane Austen(1775-1817) and Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910).Morrison’s father told her numerous folktales of the black community, that possessed an intense love of and appreciation for black culture. She was a catholic and received the baptismal name “Anthony” at the age of 12, which later became the basis of her nickname “Toni”. Morrison herself has said that Toni was a nickname that she acquired as a young adult and that she regrets having used the name when she published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970. To Morrison’s friends and family, she is still referred to by the name she was born with, Chloe Wofford. Publicly, she is known as Toni Morrison.
In 1949, Morrison entered Howard University in Washington, where she received a B.A in English in 1953. She earned a Master of Arts degree in English from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in 1955, for which she wrote a thesis on suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. After graduation, Morrison became an English instructor at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas (1955-57), and then returned to Howard to teach English .She became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha