Toni Morrison, original name 'Chloe Anthony Wofford', was born in Lorain, Ohio, on 18th February 1931 is a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, professor, and editor. Morrison’s books are known for their dramatic plots, beautiful vocabulary, and highly detailed African-American characters which are fundamental to their narratives. She has received several book-world accolades and honorary degrees, and the Presidential Medal of Liberty in 2012 as well. She was awarded the 1933 Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of her services to her field, making her the top African-American woman to be nominated for the prize. The major theme in her written books is the Black American experience; her characters conflict to find themselves and their cultural identity in an unjust society. Morrison was elected as a member of the French 'Légion d'Honneur' in 2010. Two years later she was awarded with the “U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom”.
The Black woman's pain and misery perhaps the most important subject in her writing made Morrison a reputed writer within her literary career as a journalist. With her dual grandeur, she has been widely recognized as a voice with black people and as a master craftsman of the dominant imaginative literary form. She acknowledges the true, transitory truth of physical beauty. The advanced influence of segregation was portrayed in The Bluest Eye, which is set during the Depression in the remote Midwestern city of Lorain in Ohio. This reflects on a starving passion, Pecola Breedlove, an African–American girl of eleven years. The Breedlove family story is portrayed in the book. The protagonist, Claudia MacTeer, tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, her colleague and classmate. When sharing Pecola's story and her family she uses her own stable family as a source of reference and justification. The book ends with the grown-up Claudia focusing on the events occurring between the 1940 and 1941 crashes. That year is set in her memory as the odd dark year because marigolds did not sprout. Morrison uses this picture of nature as a major structural feature to break the book into four sections – seasons - autumn, winter, spring, and summer -ironically focusing on the Pecola Breedlove tragedy.
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The four seasons here take a vertical view, as this year does not commence in January or spring but in autumn. The explanation for autumn to be the starting point of the story is that the plot of Pecola does not follow the usual traditional pattern of birth, death, and rebirth. Then, it proceeds from disaster to pathos and finally to madness. Morrison crafts The Bluest Eye to make even the aggressive and hurtful personages more compassionate. Pecola is the most obvious candidate for consideration, as she is suffering from a surprising amount of insult. There are a variety of autobiographical components to the book. The setting of the novel is the birthplace of Morrison and the story of the novel is told from a nine-year-old's perspective. Like the MacTeer household, in the Great Depression, Morrison's father was struggling to make ends meet. Like Claudia, Morrison also grew up listening to the violin played by her aunt and the songs sung by her mother. Subsequently, Morrison states, that the plot originated from a conversation she had with a little girl in elementary school, who wished for blue eyes. In the 1960s, when the Black Power Movement was fighting to restore African-American beauty, she was still writing about this debate, so she published her first book.
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