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Here is an entry from the archives about Toni Morrison, who passed away on August 5th of last year at the age of 88:
Chloe Wofford is better known to readers as Toni Morrison. She was born in Lorain, Ohio, on February 18, 1931. Lorain was a small town, with one high school. “We all played together,” Morrison remembers. “Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from east Europe or from Mexico. And there was one church and there were four elementary schools. We were all pretty much [...] very, very poor.” She never lived in a black neighborhood, and everyone just went to school together and didn’t think anything of it. “I didn’t really have a strong awareness of segregation and the separation of races until I left Lorain,” she said. She grew up listening to her mother sing — all kinds of music, from opera to the blues — and her chief sources of entertainment were radio plays, and the ghost stories and folk tales that the grown-ups around her would tell. She studied literature at Howard University and eventually returned there to teach. She took a job editing textbooks for Random House, and moved to Syracuse, New York, a divorced mother of two young boys. That was when she started writing in earnest. “I was in a place where I knew I was not going to be for a long time,” she said. “I didn’t have any friends and didn’t make any, didn’t want any because I was on my way somewhere else. So I wrote as a thing to do.” Her first book, The Bluest Eye (1970), grew from a short story she had brought to a writers’ group. In 1983, she left her publishing job to write full time. In 1987, she published the book that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize: Beloved. In 1993, she received the Nobel Prize in literature. Beloved was inspired by the real-life story of Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery in 1856. Garner fled from Kentucky with her husband and children, and made it across the Ohio River, but slave owners caught up with them. Margaret Garner killed her young daughter rather than allow her to be taken back into slavery. Morrison had come upon an article about Garner in 1974 when she was compiling The Black Book, an anthology of archival materials on the African American experience. When Morrison accepted one of many awards that Beloved received, she said that the book was necessary because there were no memorials to the millions of victims of slavery. “There’s no small bench by the road,” she said. “And because such a place doesn’t exist [...] the book had to.” Listen to today's episode >>>
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