Toni Morrison's Lorain

Description

Darlene Brown was a Lorain journalist--the first African American reporter and longtime columnist for the Lorain Journal (currently, Morning Journal). She interviewed Toni Morrison several times and reported the writer for Lorainites. This article, "Author Toni Morrison: Lorain's in Her Books," highlights the author's connection to Lorain and is also one of the earliest journalistic articles that note Toni Morrison's literary signitifance in the 1970s. It was published on February 16, 1974 in the Lorain Journal.

When Lorain was just a steel mill town, and people spent much of their time telling across the back fence or out the front door to their neighbor, there was a little girl who unknowingly passed through their lives, absorbing every ounce of their character and storing it in her memory bank.

This was not a deliberate motivation of Chloe Wofford’s, it just happened. She has since taken the life styles of hundreds of people that she has observed, reached back into her mind, and placed them in books.

She is now the author of two popular books, the second of which received national reviews from top critics.

The attractive former Lorainite writes under the name of Toni Morrison. She acquired the first name while a student at Howard University in Washington D.C. in the early ‘50s. The last is her married name.

. . . She’s in town this weekend for television tapings with Dorothy Fuldheim at Channel 5, Cleveland, and interviews and an autograph party at Higbee’s in Lorain today.

As she sat in the living room at the home of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. George Wofford, of 1438W. 21st Street, last night she talked about growing up in Lorain, and as a youth not knowing what she wanted to be.

“You know, at that age you are really nobody, and you don’t concentrate that much on. yourself. I remember other people--and things like working at the Lorain Public Library.

“I never attempted to write during that time. I think that in order to write you have to have something to say. At that time I didn’t examine my mind. I examined other peoples minds,” she recalled.

Chloe said she felt that she was a good student then and always had the desire to go to school, with the hope of some day teaching, a desire which she more than fulfilled. She taught English at Texas Southern University and at Howard University.

The 1949 Lorain High School Year book has pictures of her when she was selected to the National Honor Society, a capella choir, senate council, dramatics club, working as a library aide, and standing with the class officers, of which she was the treasurer.

This is a far cry from the job that Toni has today. She is an editor at one of the world’s largest publishing companies, Random House in New York City. She reads, rejects and accepts hundreds of manuscripts.

There is currently some talk about making “Sula” into a film, a possibility about which the author expresses a keen interest. She is also currently jotting down notes for a third novel.

“Sula” has been selected as one of the Book of the Month Club’s issues for May, and also has been bought by Bantam and will soon be sold in paperback. A condensed form of the novel appeared in the January issue of Redbook.

There is a positive feeling in the literary world that there is much more to come from Toni Morrison, and the people of Lorain should take note that they are somewhere written into these novels.