SULA

Born on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist, editor, and professor. Critics have raved over the epic themes, vivid dialouge, and richly detailed anecdotes and tales mostly about African-American people. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Love, and A Mercy. Impressively, Morrison has won nearly every book prize possible and has also been awarded an array of honorary degrees. 

 

Toni's background and childhoof has had an integral part of her novels. In many instances, she bases the storyline in her novels on her actual childhood and history with racism and discrimination. Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, Chloe was the second oldest of four children. Both her mother and father worked in order to support the family. Morrison later credited her parents with instilling in her a love of reading, music, and folklore. Morrison's childhood was filled with African American folklore, music, rituals, and myths. Her family was, as Morrison says, "intimate with the supernatural" and frequently used visions and signs to predict the future.

 

Racism was introduced into her life by her grandparents. Her mother's parents, Ardelia and John Solomon Willis, had left Greenville, Alabama, around 1910 after they lost their farm because of debts that they could not repay. Morrison's father's family left Georgia and moved north to escape sharecropping (a system of farming in which a farmer works on someone else's land and pays the owner a share of the crop) and violence against African Americans in the South.