MORRISON, Toni.

£15,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Bluest Eye. First edition, inscribed by the author on the title page, "To Paul Bartel, Regards, Toni Morrison". Bartel (1938-2000) was an actor and director, best known for his black comedy Eating Raoul (1982).Morrison wrote the novel, her debut, "in stolen moments between her day job as a book editor and her life as the single mother of two young sons" (Fox). It received little critical attention on publication, though the distinguished critic John Leonard was unstinting in his praise, describing Morrison's prose as "so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry" (Leonard). It has since been widely praised for "cut[ting] a new path through the American literary landscape by placing black girls at the center of the story" (Als). Its lasting importance was recognized in 1993, when Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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