The Nobel Prize winning author's first novel, scarce in such excellent condition.
In an interview for the National Visionary Leadership Project in 2004, Morrison explained her motivation for writing The Bluest Eye:
“... most of what was being published by Black men [was] very powerful, aggressive, revolutionary fiction or non-fiction and also they had a very positive, racially uplifting rhetoric to go with it [...] I, as an older person thought, wait a minute, you’re going to skip over something. No one’s going to remember that it wasn’t always beautiful. No one’s going to remember how hurtful a certain kind of internecine racism is.”
Initially The Bluest Eye was not a best-seller, and Morrison would say in an afterward for the 1994 edition that “the initial publication of The Bluest Eye was like Pecola’s life: dismissed, trivialized, [and] misread.”
The novel set in Ohio just after the Great Depression and tells the tragic story of Pecola a young African-American girl who is told repeatedly that she is ugly, and so wishes to have blue eyes, which she equates with "whiteness" and beauty.
A near fine copy, extremities of jacket very lightly rubbed and age-toned. Cloth lightly faded along the top and bottom edges, and spine a little rubbed. Owners signature to front free endpaper, and some offsetting to rear endpapers.
