God Help the Child by Toni Morrison is a short novel that centers loosely on the theme of childhood trauma, abuse and negligence from parents and other caretakers. Almost all of the characters in God Help the Child have experienced abuse as children, or perpetrated abuse on children. As a result, the novel moves its main characters, Bride and Booker, toward symbolic closure, acceptance and resolution through acts that take them back to childhood, and also acts that take them forward into a world in which grief is survivable, memory is bearable, and they can live as themselves without being injured by old wounds or injuring anyone else.
Toni Morrison (born 1931) was best known for her intricately woven novels, which focused on intimate relationships, especially between men and women, set against the backdrop of African American cultu...
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"When they say I'm a great American novelist," Toni Morrison commented to Gail Caldwell in an interview published in Conversations with Toni Morrison, "I say, 'Ha! They're trying to say I'm not black....
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One of the most prominent contemporary analysts of the black experience, Toni Morrison has, within a decade, established herself as a significant American novelist. As a senior editor at Random Hous...
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When her picture appeared on the cover of Newsweek in 1981 and her fourth novel, Tar Baby, was on the year's best-seller list, Toni Morrison was an anomaly in two respects: she is a black writer who...
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[This entry was updated by Catherine E. Lewis (University of South Carolina) from the entry by Denise Heinze (Western Carolina University) in DLB 143: American Novelists Since World War II, Third Seri...
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Biography EssayToni Morrison is one of America's most important writers of fiction. She has received critical acclaim, most notably the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987), the 1978 National Book C...
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Toni Morrison was born and raised in Lorain, Ohio. "Only The Bluest Eye, my first book, is set in Lorain. In the others I was more interested in mood than in geography.... [However], no matter what I ...
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