[Download] The Bluest Eye

221 Pages·1970·0.5 MB·English

by  Toni Morrison

acclaim for
Toni Morrison
“[Toni Morrison] may be the last classic American writer,
squarely in the tradition of Poe, Melville, Twain and Faulkner.”
—Newsweek
“In the first ranks of our living novelists.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist
but a major figure in our national literature.”
—The New York Review of Books
“She is the best writer in America.”
—John Leonard, National Public Radio
“[Toni Morrison] has moved from strength to strength until
she has reached the distinction of being beyond comparison.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Morrison is one of the most exciting living American writers.”
—The Kansas City Star
The Bluest Eye
“Toni Morrison has made herself into the D. H. Lawrence of
the black psyche, transforming individuals into forces, idio-
syncrasy into inevitability.” —New York
“Morrison is perhaps the finest novelist of our time.” —Vogue
“Toni Morrison is one of the finest writers in America today.”
—Louisville Courier-Journal
Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humani-
ties, Emeritus at Princeton University. She has received the
National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In
1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives
in Rockland County, New York, and Princeton, New Jersey.
also by toni morrison
fiction
Love
Paradise
Jazz
Beloved
Tar Baby
Song of Solomon
Sula
nonfiction
The Dancing Mind
Playing in the Dark:
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
L
T H E
B L U E S T
L
E Y E
a novel
Toni Morrison
vintage international
Vintage Books
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY 2007
Copyright ©1970, copyright renewed 1998by Toni Morrison
Foreword © 1993, 2007by Toni Morrison
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random
House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in
the United States by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc, in 1970, and
subsequently published in slightly different form in hardcover
by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1993.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon
are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of the foreword were previously published as the
afterword to the 1993Knopf edition.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Morrison, Toni.
The bluest eye / by Toni Morrison. —1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Afro-Americans—Ohio—Fiction. 2. Girls—Ohio—Fiction. I. Title
PS3563.08749855 1993
813.54—dc20
93-43124
eISBN: 978- 0-307-38658-8
www.vintagebooks.com
v1.0
To the two who gave me life
and the one who made me free

Foreword
There can’t be anyone, I am sure, who doesn’t know what it
feels like to be disliked, even rejected, momentarily or for sus-
tained periods of time. Perhaps the feeling is merely indiffer-
ence, mild annoyance, but it may also be hurt. It may even be
that some of us know what it is like to be actually hated—
hated for things we have no control over and cannot change.
When this happens, it is some consolation to know that the
dislike or hatred is unjustified—that you don’t deserve it. And
if you have the emotional strength and/or support from family
and friends, the damage is reduced or erased. We think of it as
the stress (minor or disabling) that is part of life as a human.
When I began writing The Bluest Eye, I was interested
in something else. Not resistance to the contempt of oth-
ers, ways to deflect it, but the far more tragic and disabling
consequences of accepting rejection as legitimate, as self-
evident. I knew that some victims of powerful self-loathing
turn out to be dangerous, violent, reproducing the enemy
who has humiliated them over and over. Others surrender