From 1955 to 1957, Morrison taught humanities and English at Texas Southern State University in Houston. In 1957, she returned to Washington, D.C., to teach English at Howard University, and a year later, she met and married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect. Stifled by her marriage, she discovered that writing enabled her to cope with depression and isolation: "I had nothing left but my imagination. I had no will, no judgment, no perspective, no power, no authority, no self — just this brutal sense of irony, melancholy, and a trembling respect for words. I wrote like someone with a dirty habit. Secretly — compulsively — slyly." Consequently, she joined a writer's workshop and began developing a short story about a black girl's obsession with blue eyes, which eventually became her first novel, The Bluest Eye.
In 1964, following a family trip to Europe, Morrison left Howard University, divorced her husband, and moved back to Lorain with her two sons, Harold Ford and Slade Kevin. A year later, in 1965, she moved her children to Syracuse, New York, where she worked as a textbook editor for Random House. In 1967, she was promoted to senior editor, a position that enabled her to help publish the works of several African-American authors, including Andrew Young, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, and Angela Davis.
In 1970 — while working as a full-time editor, teaching part-time, and raising her two sons — Morrison completed The Bluest Eye, which depicts the psychological destruction of Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl who idealizes white standards of female beauty. In 1971, Morrison returned to the classroom as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at the State University of New York in Purchase; she continued to write. In 1973, she completed her second novel, Sula, which would be nominated for the National Book Award in 1975. In Sula, Morrison established a theme that would pervade each of her subsequent works: the secret, mystical world of the black woman living in a pariah community.
