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Toni Morrison is Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton University. She has written seven novels, the most recent of which is A Mercy and has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
This short but very moving novel is an early work by the Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison, first published in 1970. According to an Afterword by the author, at that time the book was 'dismissed, trivialised, misread'. It is in fact a seminal work of Black American culture, set in small town Ohio in 1941. The story grew from an incident in Morrison's own life when a friend told her she wanted blue eyes, and how when Morrison visualized how grotesque her black friend would look if she got her wish, she fell into a rage. She would not have known then to identify her friend's wish as racial self-loathing, but in retrospect she sees that is what it was. The incident vividly illustrates the status quo before the 'Black Power' movement of the sixties, and is the inspiration behind the story narrated by Claudia McTeer, from a poor but respectable family, who give a foster-home to a girl named Pecola Breedlove who is about twelve, the same age as the narrator's elder sister. Eventually it is revealed that Pecola's father, Cholly, has raped his daughter, leaving her pregnant. Throguhout the narrative Morrison's use of language and incident highlights the unfair and arbitrary gap between the fortunes of black and white Americans. (Kirkus UK)
