The Bluest Eye is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove - a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others - who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
The Bluest Eye, published in 1969, is the first of Toni Morrison's ten novels. It announced the arrival of one of the most important literary voices of her time and has remained for nearly thirty-five years her consistently best-read book. Oprah's Book Club selected The Bluest Eye in 2000, assuring its yet wider readership.
Toni Morrison has been hailed as "black America's best novelist and one of America's best." In her own words, she writes "village" or "peasant" literature about the American black experience and culture. But she does so with language of such lyrical power and such vivid dialogue that, regardless of her subject, reading her words is a genuine pleasure. Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton University.
Toni Morrison won the National Book Critics Award in 1977 for Song of Solomon, the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Beloved and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
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