Like her character Milkman Dead, Toni Morrison came of age in a family that had only recently left the South and moved to the Midwest. Her mother's family migrated north from Greenville, Alabama, around the turn of the century as part of the Great Migration of southern Blacks to the urban North. Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931—the same year as Milkman Dead's birth—in Lorain, Ohio, where her first book, The Bluest Eye, is set. She recalled a childhood in which she was "intimate with the supernatural," and read the classics of the Western tradition.
Morrison graduated from Howard University and took a master's degree at Cornell, then returned to Howard to teach, including among her students Claude Brown and Stokely Carmichael. While at Howard, she married a Jamaican architectural student named Harold Morrison,.....
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