Toni Morrison Research Paper

Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby:The American Hunt for Identity Toni Morrison, born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931. Native to Lorain, Ohio,she is the second oldest of four children. Her father, George Wofford and her mother Ramah both maintained jobs to support the family. Her father worked primarily as a welder, also maintaining several jobs, her mother, a domestic worker. Morrison credits her parents with instilling in her a love of reading, music, and storytelling. During childhood, she was an avid reader and an excellent student.. During her formative years whilst living in an integrated neighborhood, Morrison was not fully aware of racial dissection until her teens. Later in life she had this to say of her experience."When I was in first grade, nobody thought I was inferior. I was the only black in the class and the only child who could read," [1] she told a reporter from The New York Times. Morrison took Latin in school, and read many works of famed European literature. She in 1949, she graduated from Lorain High School maintaining honors. She then attended Howard University there she began studying English. While at Howard, many of her classmates

The likes of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf proved to be most inspirational to her due to their stream-of-consciousness narratives told from multiple perspectives, leading her to base her masters thesis on the two writers. These, among other writers, would prove to have noticeable influence on her works in the years to come. In 1958 Morrison married a Jamaican architect named Harold Morrison, three years following her masters completion. Together the couple had two sons and ultimately divorced in 1964. After moving to Syracuse, New York with her sons, Morrison went to work for Random House Publishing as an editor. While at Random House, she specialized in acquiring and editing black