Morrison's Debut Novel
MORRISON, Toni The Bluest Eye. London: Chatto & Windus. 1970.
8vo. Original blue cloth with gilt title lettering to spine, Illustrated dust jacket not price-clipped and designed by Kate Cary; pp. [vi], 164, [6]; minimal sunning to spine and foxing to topedge, otherwise near fine.
First UK edition, very scarce in this condition.
"Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do."
The legendary Toni Morrison's first novel and a powerful excavation of racism in America. Set in Morrison's own home town, it traces a black girl's upbringing in a prejudiced white society. A courageous examination of what it means to adhere to a societal concept of beauty, The Bluest Eye poses the most important questions about race, class and gender discrimination. Morrison's debut established a revolutionary literary terrain by, for the first time, establishing young black girls at the forefront of the narrative. She managed to complete this unforgettable novel whilst raising two sons as a single mother and simultaneously maintaining her job as a book editor for Random House in New York, for which she became senior fiction editor.
A towering female figure in 20th Century literature, in 1993, Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was the first black woman to receive the prize. In her acceptance speech, Morrison stressed the importance of language "partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as an agency – as an act with consequences".
An excerpt of the offical academy statement read; "She delves into the language itself, a language she wants to liberate from the fetters of race",
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