Insightful and consistently critical of her own work, Morrison has used the theme of love and the effects of its rarity in today’s society as her basis in many works while also examining how it affects the live of characters, especially those in in smaller self-contained communities.
As a young girl Morrison was taught to appreciate the vastness of her African-American heritage and the power and joy brought by great literature. It wasn’t until she was an adult traveling through South Africa with a repertory company from Howard University that Morrison saw firsthand the life of the black people there. After graduating Morrison was offered a job at Texas Southern University where she was surprised at how they celebrated African-American heritage. It was after this that she was introduced to the idea of black culture not as just personal family reminiscences but as a discipline that was to be respected and researched ad nauseam, compared to her experience at Howard where African-American culture was either neglected or marginalized. This discovery of the minimization of the black culture in the school that she attended could be considered the abandoning of her roots and her