By Jacob Stoebel

"I would like my work to do two things: be as demanding and sophisticated as I want it to be, and at the same time be accessible in a sort of emotional way to lots of people, just like jazz. That's a hard task. But that's what I want to do."

- Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 in the industrial town of Loraine, Ohio. The second of four children to Ramah Willis and George Wofford, her infinitely loving and nurturing parents had moved to Ohio from the South to escape persecution and seek better financial opportunities.

Her father, primarily a shipyard welder, held as many as three jobs at a time to support his family. Excellent craftsmanship was important to George, who, when he completed welding a perfect seam, also welded his name on the side of ships, bound years later for Europe in the Second World War.

Performance, song and storytelling were also valued in Morrison's childhood home. Morrison's mother played piano at local movie theatres and sang in the choir of the local church. Her grandfather played the violin. At home both of Morrison's parents told numerous stories of Southern Black folklore and, after her parents had told their stories, Morrison and her siblings were encouraged to tell their own.

As she grew older, Morrison developed an interest for reading. She enjoyed classics such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Austen, as well as modern writers like Hemingway and Faulkner. While the books she read were far removed from her experience in Lorain, Morrison found meaning in these books. "They were so magnificently done that I got them anyway - they spoke directly to me out of their own specificity," she would later note.

Her hometown of Lorain was also the setting for The Bluest Eye, described by Morrison as "an escape from stereotyped black settings - neither plantation nor ghetto." Here, Morrison's family lived in an ethnically mixed neighborhood of Southern Blacks, Mexicans and European immigrants.

She attended an integrated school and befriended many of her white classmates. Morrison excelled in school and did not encounter discrimination until adolescence when she started dating.

Yet race retaliations were far from perfect for Morrison growing up. Her "father was a racist," she admits. "As a child in Georgia, he received shocking impressions of adult white people, and for the rest of his life felt he was justified in despising all whites, and that they were not justified in despising him."

Morrison graduated with honors from Lorain High School and, with financial assistance and much sacrifice from her parents, became the first woman in her family to attend college - Howard University in Washington, D.C. There she studied English and the classics and, in her spare time, wrote fiction.

Morrison graduated from Howard with a B.A. in English and later received her M.A. from Cornell. She married Harold Morrison in 1958 and had two sons.

When the marriage ended in 1964, she took a job as an editor with Random House to support her family. Here she influenced the publishing of numerous textbooks including the influential Black Book, about the untold story of the African-American experience in United States history.

In her off-hours, after putting her children to bed, Morrison found solace in writing fiction. She dusted off a short story written before her divorce and turned it into a full-length novel. It was inspired from a classmate she knew in Lorain, a black child who dreamed of having blue eyes. After five years of hard, after-hours work, The Bluest Eye was published in 1970.

Since it's publication, Morrison has continued to publish steadily, writing non-fiction, a short story, several articles, a play and six more novels, including Beloved, Song of Solomon, and Sula. Her work earned her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, making her the first black women to do so.

Yet for all of her writing about the African-American experience, Morrison transcends the genera of African-American literature from which she hails. Her poetic, yet porous writing reminiscent of earlier modern writers like William Faulkner and James Joyce, leave much responsibility with the reader.

Like her parents, who asked her to participate in family storytelling, Morrison asks her readers to supply "the emotions . . . even some of the color, some of the sound. My language has to have holes and spaces so the reader can come into it.