The Bluest Eye
Author: Toni Morrison
NATIONAL BESTSELLER - From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner--a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtly and grace.
In Morrison's acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove--an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Here, Morrison's writing is "so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry" (The New York Times).
Author: Toni Morrison
NATIONAL BESTSELLER - From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner--a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtly and grace.
In Morrison's acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove--an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Here, Morrison's writing is "so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry" (The New York Times).
Author: Toni Morrison
NATIONAL BESTSELLER - From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner--a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtly and grace.
In Morrison's acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove--an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Here, Morrison's writing is "so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry" (The New York Times).
About the Author:
Having authored a multitude of fiction and nonfiction works, Howard University alumna and professor Toni Morrison (B.A.’53, H ’95) is one of the most celebrated and controversial modern authors. Her enduringly poignant literary work explores the plurality of Black narratives, particularly through the eyes of Black women and girls, in a stunningly eloquent and versatile literary voice. Troubled by the dominant assumption of a white reader, Morrison made a point of not centering the white gaze. Her revolutionary oeuvre attracted critical acclaim in the United States and around the world, and in 1993 Morrison made history as the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Morrison’s novels continue to be a subject of richly complex scholarship, contemporary relevance, and attempted censorship.
Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18th, 1931, in the small industrial town of Lorain, Ohio. Both of Morrison’s grandparents were sharecroppers from Alabama, and because her grandfather grew up during a time when it was illegal for Black people to read at all, her parents felt strongly about encouraging her to read. Though the Woffords moved to different apartments around Lorain frequently, as they struggled to pay rent, the Lorain Public Library remained an important part of the family’s life. In 1995, she attended the dedication of the Toni Morrison reading room at the Lorain Public Library.
