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TONI MORRISON has been the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Princeton University. She lives in Rockland County, New York, and Princeton, New Jersey. [Edit review] [Delete review]

Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison’s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing. [Edit review] [Delete review]

“So precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.”
—The New York Times

“A profoundly successful work of fiction. . . . Taut and understated, harsh in its detachment, sympathetic in its truth...it is an experience.” —The Detroit Free Press

“This story commands attention, for it contains one black girl’s universe.”
—Newsweek [Edit review] [Delete review]

Nuns go by as quiet as lust, and drunken men and sober eyes sing in the lobby of the Greek hotel. Rosemary Villanucci, our next-door friend who lives above her father's cafe, sits in a 1939 Buick eating bread and butter. She rolls down the window to tell my sister Frieda and me that we can't come in. We stare at her, wanting her bread, but more than that wanting to poke the arrogance out of her eyes and smash the pride of ownership that curls her chewing mouth. When she comes out of the car we will beat her up, make red marks on her white skin, and she will cry and ask us do we want her to pull her pants down. We will say no. We don't know what we should feel or do if she does, but whenever she asks us, we know she is offering us something precious and that our own pride must be asserted by refusing to accept.


School has started, and Frieda and I get new brown stockings and cod-liver oil. Grown-ups talk in tired, edgy voices about Zick's Coal Company and take us along in... [More...] [Edit review] [Delete review]