The Bluest Eye. by MORRISON, Toni

New York, Holt, Reinhart and Winton, 1970. . First edition; 8vo (21.5 x 14.5 cm); publisher's quarter blue cloth, grey boards, title in silver to spine, corners very slightly bumped, dust-jacket, price clipped, slightly sunned, two minor tears otherwise a good copy. Toni Morrison's first novel and a landmark in African-American literature 'The Bluest Eye is an inquiry into the reasons why beauty gets wasted in this country. The beauty in this case is black. Miss Morrison's prose is so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry... I have said poetry but The Bluest Eye is also history, sociology, folklore, nightmare and music.' - John Leonard (The New York Times). Toni Morrison (1931- 2019) rose to fame with her critically acclaimed novel Song of Solomon, which was published in 1977 and won her the National Book Critics Circle Award. She received the Pullitzer prize nine years later for Beloved but it wasn't until 1993 that she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first black woman to do so. An avid fan of the author, Oprah Winfrey spent ten years co-producing and eventually starring in the 1998 screen adaptation of the Beloved trilogy. She later featured Morrison's novels in her book club section of the Oprah Winfrey Show, which had on average 13 million viewers and resulted in the author's book sales increasing dramatically. In her final years Morrison publicly voiced her disdain for the rise of Donald Trump who she described as 'endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan'.