Toni Morrison

Our Feature Writer of the month is Toni Morrison, a contemporary Afro-American novelist—still living—who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for her novel, Beloved, and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993.

She was born “Chloe Ardella Woffard” in 1931 to a working-class family in Lorain, Ohio, but changed her name to “Toni” after St. Anthony when she became a Catholic at the age of 12.  She did not always aspire to becoming a writer, but dreamed instead of becoming a book publisher and university teacher.  She studied English at Howard University and then attended graduate school at Cornell University, where she wrote a thesis onWilliam Faulkner and Virginia Woolf before returning to Howard as a professor.  Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was the result of a creative writing exercise she pursued while participating in a poetry group at Howard.

Morrison’s first efforts as a writer did not meet with immediate success. More committed to establishing a venue for Afro-American authors in American publishing, Morrison left Howard to work at Random House and, eventually, to teach at Yale University. Her own novel-in-progress did not meet with much encouragement and so took her ten years to finish writing.  Influenced by the Afro-American folk tales her father used to tell her, and the stream-of-consciousness of Faulkner and Woolf, her mythical story of a black child longing to have blue eyes like the white child-star Shirley Temple was too fresh and original to fit with the expectations of mainstream publishing.

Despite or maybe because of the misunderstanding her work met, the plight of the The Bluest Eye stirred up Morrison’s own confidence and sense of herself as a writer. When it was finally published in 1970, her powers as a writer were unleashed and in quick succession she wrote many of the novels she’s come to be known for:  Sula (1973), which was nominated for the National Book Award, Song of Solomon (1977), a best-seller that brought her national recognition, and ultimately Beloved  (1987) which won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award and led to her nomination for the highest literary acclaim of all: The Nobel Prize (1993). Her subsequent novels include:  Jazz (1992), Paradise (1997), Love (2003), A Mercy (2008) and Home (2012). Beloved was made into a successful feature film in 1998.

Her novels are not an easy read as she explores multiple and shifting points of view and the poetic cadences of Afro-American dialect in an attempt to rewrite history from the sensibility of her oppressed ancestors.

Morrison has received the highest accolades as a writer and is also credited with founding the prestigious Princeton Atelier at Princeton University, a workshop that brings students into contact with established and well- renowned artists. Now in her 80s, she continues to influence young writers through her position as Writer-in-Residence at Oberlin College.

Writer of the month

This month our cover images feature the great American writer Ernest Hemingway who lived much of his life as an expatriate in Cuba and in Europe.  Hemingway had a unique style of writing with uncluttered and straight forward prose.  He was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois and started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. He was a man of action and joined the First World War as a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. 

He served in the front-line near Trieste in Italy and was decorated by the Italian Government while he spent considerable time in hospitals recovering from serious wounds. Once returning to the United States, he worked as a newspaper reporter and was soon sent back to Europe.

During the twenties, in Paris, Hemingway became part of a group of great expatriate Americans and he worked on what he described as his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). This was followed up by his equally successful novel was A Farewell to Arms (1929), which portrays the life of an American ambulance officer during WWI and his disillusionment with the war. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.  As an expatriate in France he associated with other great  writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S Eliot and James Joyce.

Finca Vigia, Ernest Hemingway's old house in Cuba.

Hemingway was fascinated with Spanish culture and the brutality of the bullfighting.  He himself was a hunter in Africa and a deep sea fisherman in Cuba. He wrote a lot about these topics and his writing portrays men with machismo qualities.  His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women (1927), The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). 

After the Castro revolution in Cuba, Hemingway who was suffering from illness, left his residence  outside Havana and returned to the US where he died in 1961.