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Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia ( Anthony) Wofford on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, where her parents, migrants from the South, had moved to, to escape the problems of southern racism. Morrison's parents instilled in her the value of group loyalty, which they believed was essential to surviving the harsh realities of racial tension that was very prevalent during then.

As an African-American in a town of immigrants, Toni Morrison grew up with the notion that the only place she could turn to for aid and reassurance would be within her own community in Lorain, Ohio where, she had "an escape from stereotyped black settings -- neither plantation nor ghetto".
She grew up in a lively household surrounded by songs, fairy tales, ghost stories, myths, music, and the language of their African-American heritage. As Morrison grew up in a family that possessed an intense love of and appreciation for black culture with storytelling, songs, and folktales being a deeply formative part of her childhood, the importance of both listening to stories and creating them contributed to Morrison's profound love of reading. Morrison's parents encouraged her passion for reading, learning, and culture, as well as a confidence in her own abilities and attributes as a woman. As an adolescent she became enthralled by classic literature, reading voraciously, the great European writers while being especially given to Jane Austen, Russian classics such as Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky and Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Morrison graduated high school with honors in 1949 and went on to attend Howard University in Washington D.C., America's most distinguished black college to study English. As a member of the Howard Repertory Theatre, Morrison was often part of their trips to perform which gave her the opportunity to observe the African-American experience in the South. my african careers
In 1953, she graduated from Howard University with a bachelor's degree in English and a minor in Classics and went on to pursue graduate studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York where she wrote her thesis on "alienation and suicide in the works of William Faulkner and VirginiaWoolf" which demonstrated that both writers were as deeply concerned as Morrison would be with the interiority of their characters and with innovative approaches to the novel form.

This had much effect on her writing for as Morrison has said she tries,'to incorporate into the traditional genre of the novel, unorthodox novelistic characteristics of Black art...' She admits that she doesn't regard Black literature as simply books by Black people, or simply as literature written about Black people or simply as literature that uses a certain mode of language in which you sort of drop g's. Whilst there she became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.and met and married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect and fellow faculty member with whom she had two sons: Harold Ford and Slade Morrison. After one week, Morrison had brought nothing so to save her face she quickly wrote a story based on a black girl she knew during her childhood who kept praying to God for blue eyes. Although her group enjoyed the story, Morrison put it away, thinking she was done with it.

Morrison thus began writing fiction as part of her obligation to sustain this informal discussion group of writers at Howard University. The story later evolved into her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970). While writing this novel she was raising two children and teaching at Howard. At Random House, she played an important part in bringing African American literature into the mainstream. She edited books by such black authors as Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis and Gayl Jones, mentored these among many African-American women writers and compiled as well as anthologized the works and histories of African-Americans while continuing to teach at two branches of the State University of New York. In the evening, Morrison cooked dinner and played with her sons until their bedtime, when she would start writing. All of my work has to do with books.

Morrison began to develop the story. I regret having called myself Toni Morrison when I published my first novel, The Bluest Eye".