📍Lorain, Ohio, USA
1931 – 1949“I was born Chloe Wofford in Lorain, a steel town on Lake Erie in Ohio, in 1931, the second of four children. My father, George, was a welder in the shipyards and steel mills, who took on several jobs at once during the Depression; my mother, Ramah, sang in church and kept our home together. Lorain was a mixed town of immigrants and Black families from the South, and our neighbourhood was, as I said later, neither plantation nor ghetto. We lived alongside Italian, Mexican and Eastern European neighbours. When I was about two, our landlord set fire to the house we rented while we were inside it, because my parents could not pay the four-dollar rent. My family laughed about it afterwards, and that laughter taught me how people keep their dignity in the face of cruelty. Our house was full of stories: my parents and grandparents told ghost stories, folktales and memories of the South, and sang songs, and I listened to everything. I was a great reader, and as a teenager I worked after school at the Lorain Public Library, shelving books and working for the head librarian. I graduated with honours from Lorain High School in 1949, went to Howard University and later became an editor and a novelist. My first novel, The Bluest Eye, is set in Lorain, and the town's voices run through much of my work. When I won the Nobel Prize in 1993, Lorain asked how it could honour me. I did not want a school or a park renamed; I asked instead for a reading room in my old library, with comfortable chairs, and in 1995 I cut the ribbon on the Toni Morrison Reading Room.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today