Bom Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison has emerged as one of the leading voices in American literature since the publication of her first novel, The Bluest Eye, (also covered in Literature and Its Times), in 1970. Morrison's writings are largely concerned with the African American experience; their author, in fact, declares that her art is inherently political. In 1988 her novel Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, testimony to the groundbreaking nature of her achievements. This victory was followed by Morrison's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
The position of post-Civil War blacks. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 and the end of the Civil War brought immediate legal freedom to more than 4 million blacks in the South. The importation of slaves from Africa had ceased after a new law in 1808 curtailed the international slave trade, with the result that the blacks freed at the end of the war were predominately American-born. These ex-slaves had no sustaining support after the Civil War. Trained for few tasks beyond farming and for the most part uneducated (since it was illegal for slaves to learn or be taught to read), many freed blacks found their new situation as equally dismal as the old, but now they possessed no means to survive.
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