As senior editor at Random House, she has brought into print, among other works, the autobiographies of Muhammad Ali and Angela Davis and fiction by Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas, and Gayl Jones (whose
Corregidora, she wrote, "lit up the dark past of slave women with klieg lights" and reduced her to "a hungry reader and not a professional one"). Her purpose as an editor reflects her purpose as a writer: "I look very hard for black fiction because I want to participate in developing a canon of black work. We've had the first rush of black entertainment, where blacks were writing for whites, and whites were encouraging this kind of self-flagellation. Now we can get down to the craft of writing, where black people are talking to black people."
Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, Toni Morrison grew up in the Depression in Lorain, Ohio, the second of four children of strong-minded, self-reliant parents. Her father, George Wofford, a shipyard welder, worked three jobs simultaneously for most of seventeen years and was proud enough of his workmanship that he wrote his name in the side of the ship whenever he welded a perfect seam.
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