One of America's most celebrated African American novelists, Toni Morrison has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, to parents who had migrated north from Georgia and Kentucky. While a student at Howard University she changed her name to Toni and later married and divorced a Jamaican architect named Harold Morrison. She set her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in her hometown of Lorain.
Standards of beauty. Even before the novel's main character, Pecola Breedlove, becomes pregnant with her father's child in 1941, the joy has gone out of her young life. The Bluest Eye is the story of how Pecola, other children, and also adults suffer at the hands of a dominant culture that reveres light-skinned people, preferably blond and blue-eyed ones.
Admiration for these traits was widespread by 1941, as was the perceived superiority of the people of European descent who possessed them. Not surprisingly, a number of the blacks in the novel exhibit the damage done to their self-image by this admiration for traits they did not possess.
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