Toni earned her Bachelor’s degree in Arts at Howard University in Washington, D. C. in 1953. She then went on to earn her Master’s degree in Arts at Cornell University in New York in 1955. Toni then began working as a teacher at Texas Southern University, teaching introductory English. She worked there until 1957. In 1957, she went back to her old school, Howard University, to begin teaching there, where she stayed until 1964. The next year, Toni became a fiction editor at Random House in New York. She also taught at the State University of New York at Albany from 1984 until she left to work at Princeton University in 1989.
During her years of teaching, she also met and married her husband, a Jamaican architect named Harold Morrison. In 1961, Toni gave birth to the couple’s first son in 1961. A few years later, while pregnant with the couple’s second son, Toni left her deteriorating marriage, later divorcing her husband, Harold.
Toni’s two passions in life were raising her sons and writing. She would work during the day, spend time with her sons in the evening, and then write at night. She published her first book in 1970. It is entitled The Bluest Eye, and is about a young African-American girl who is obsessed by white people’s high standards of beauty and dreams of having blue eyes.
Her second novel was published in 1973. Sula is about the friendship between two African-American women. This book was an alternate selection in the Book-of-the-Month Club. Parts of the book were published in Redbook magazine. It was also nominated for the 1975 National Book Award in fiction.
Changing her style a bit, Toni’s third book focuses on an African-American male character. Song of Solomon was published in 1977. In this book, the narrator is in search of hi own identity. She had gained male perspective for this novel by watching her sons. This novel won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. After publishing this book, President Jimmy Carter appointed Toni to the National Council of the Arts.
In 1981, Toni’s fourth novel was published. Tar Baby was Toni’s first book to contain interaction between both African-American and Caucasian characters. It takes place in the Caribbean and deals with many issues, including race and sex.
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