Black History Month Birthday Books: Two by Toni Morrison

Henry Bemis Books wishes a happy birthday to a distinguished African-American writer, of whom The Writer’s Almanac says:

It’s the 86th birthday of Chloe Wofford, better known to readers as Toni Morrison. She was born in Lorain, Ohio, on this date in 1931. Lorain was a small town, with one high school. “We all played together,” Morrison remembers. “Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from east Europe or from Mexico. And there was one church and there were four elementary schools. We were all pretty much [...] very, very poor.” She never lived in a black neighborhood, and everyone just went to school together and didn’t think anything of it. “I didn’t really have a strong awareness of segregation and the separation of races until I left Lorain,” she said. She grew up listening to her mother sing — all kinds of music, from opera to the blues — and her chief sources of entertainment were radio plays, and the ghost stories and folktales that the grown-ups around her would tell.

She studied literature at Howard University and eventually returned there to teach. She took a job editing textbooks for Random House, and moved to Syracuse, New York, a divorced mother of two young boys. That was when she started writing in earnest. “I was in a place where I knew I was not going to be for a long time,” she said. “I didn’t have any friends and didn’t make any, didn’t want any because I was on my way somewhere else. So I wrote as a thing to do.” Her first book, The Bluest Eye (1970), grew from a short story she had brought to a writers’ group. In 1983, she left her publishing job to write full time. In 1987, she published the book that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize: Beloved. In 1993, she received the Nobel Prize in literature.

Beloved was inspired by the real-life story of Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery in 1856. Garner fled from Kentucky with her husband and children, and made it across the Ohio River, but slave owners caught up with them. Margaret Garner killed her young daughter rather than allow her to be taken back into slavery. Morrison had come upon an article about Garner in 1974 when she was compiling The Black Book, an anthology of archival materials on the African-American experience. When Morrison accepted one of many awards that Beloved received, she said that the book was necessary because there were no memorials to the millions of victims of slavery. “There’s no small bench by the road,” she said. “And because such a place doesn’t exist [...] the book had to.”

Morrison has published 11 novels, including Song of Solomon (1977), Jazz (1992), and A Mercy (2008). Her latest novel is God Help the Child, which came out last year (2015). She wrote a number of children’s books that were illustrated by her son Slade; he died of cancer in 2010. She also wrote the libretto for an opera based on the life of Margaret Garner (2005).

Henry Bemis has two of Morrison’s best-loved works in first editions:

Morrison, Toni, Beloved (Knopf, 1st stated ed., 1987). ISBN 0-394-53597-9. Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by the Nobel Laureate. Hardcover, unclipped dust jacket, some light spots on cover, light water stain through bottom corner of text block, but not affecting readability or appreciation of this fine work. Previous owner’s bookplate on front pastedown. A good reading copy. HBB price: $20.

Morrison, Toni, Paradise (Knopf, 1st stated ed., 1998). ISBN 0-679-43374-0. Near fine hardcover in near fine, unclipped dust jacket. HBB price: $49.95.

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