A born mimic, actor, storyteller, and reader from early childhood, Morrison was expected to excel, even though she had to fight the paranoia that accompanied growing up in an educational milieu that ignored the contributions of nonwhites. Undeterred, she wrote and told stories, read poetry, and followed the example of ballerina Maria Tallchief, who Morrison idolized for her ability to promote her Native American culture while simultaneously enriching the arts. At Lorain High School, Morrison completed four years of Latin and graduated at the top of her class. She then surprised her family by insisting on leaving Lorain to obtain a college degree, which her father paid for by working three jobs.
Having educated herself in the achievements of blacks, Morrison — already steeped in the fiction of French, English, and Russian novelists — entered Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she changed her first name to Toni. She studied under strong African-American spokesmen: poet Sterling Brown and philosopher and critic Alain Locke, a Rhodes scholar who edited The New Negro.
Morrison received the standard English education: a strong grounding in the white males who dominate literature — Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Melville, and Wordsworth. She immersed herself in the Howard Unity Players, the university repertory company, and toured the South for the first time, playing to black audiences during the unsettled pre-civil rights era. Morrison graduated with a B.A. in 1953 and completed a master's degree in English at Cornell two years later, with a concentration in the work of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner.
