A Review of the Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was born February 18, 1931 and is one of the most prominent authors in world literature, having won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 for her collected works.   She was born Chloe Anthony Wofford   and was the second of four children in a working-class American family. In 1949 Morrison entered Howard University to study humanities. While there she changed her name from "Chloe" to "Toni," from her middle name, Anthony. Morrison received a B.A. in English from Howard in 1953, then earned a Master of Arts degree from Cornell University in 1955. After graduation, Morrison became an English instructor at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas (from 1955-57) then returned to Howard to teach English. In 1958 she married Howard Morrison. They had two children and divorced in 1964. After the divorce she moved to Syracuse, New York, where she worked as a textbook editor. Eighteen months later she went to work as an editor at the New York City headquarters of Random House. In 1970 she published her first novel, the Bluest Eye. In 1984 she was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University at Albany, The State University of New York. Morrison was appointed Robert F. Goheen Professor of the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University in the spring of 1989, a position she held until May 2006. The same day she announced her retirement from this post, the New York Times Book Review named her novel Beloved the best novel of the past 25 years.

Ms Morrison is one of the most qualified authors to write about and discuss the issues of race and gender and this is sadly and remarkably seen in her first novel, the Bluest Eye. In this book, Ms Morrison attempts to make a statement about the damage that internalized racism can do. She evaluates racial self-loathing; its causes and effects by following the experiences and interactions of several members of the small community of Lorain, Ohio in the early 1940's. She shows us how the prevalent... [continues]

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