Go There To Know There

Toni Morrison, b. 1931 (photo from theguardianuk.com) Chloe Anthony Wofford (now Toni Morrison) was born in February of 1931 in Lorain, Ohio. Hers was a large family headed by devoted and hard-working parents who had moved the family from the South to Ohio to escape the pervasive racism and discrimination there. With them, they brought "the traditions of song and storytelling"--thereby introducing their daughter to a rich cultural heritage that would become the basis of much of Morrison's fiction (Gates 2211). Intellectually precocious, Morrison began reading at an early age, and her tastes ranged across national and generic boundaries: She was drawn to the work of Jane Austen, Gustav Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dostoyevski ( 1 ). She would become the first member of her family to attend college. As Gates relates, the students there could not pronounce her name, so she elected to go by "Toni." The first African American novelist to receive the Nobel Prize...