In 1957, Morrison taught humanities and English at Texas Southern University, then worked for eight years as an English instructor at Howard University. In 1966, she joined a monthly literary symposium and contributed stories that she had begun in high school. Among them was a story she read aloud to the symposium about a black girl who wanted to make up for her so-called physical shortcomings — her strong Negroid features — by petitioning God for blue eyes.
From 1965 to 1983, Morrison served as a textbook editor at Random House, in Syracuse, New York. Divorced, raising two small sons, and working at a full-time, demanding job, she still managed to plug away at The Bluest Eye, her personal therapy for depression and isolation. Explaining her drive to write, Morrison has said that she had a deep need for "books that I had wanted to read. No one had written them yet, so I wrote them." She has said this about her compulsion to complete her first manuscript: "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."
By the time the manuscript for The Bluest Eye was complete in 1968, Morrison had risen to the rank of senior editor at Random House's publishing headquarters in New York City. According to her, her first novel sold for racial reasons: Random House wanted a black writer in its stable.
A year later, she returned to the classroom for a year as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at State University of New York in Purchase, settled into a renovated boathouse outside Nyack, and continued to write. Four years later, she completed Sula, her second novel, which continues her demarcation of the black woman's world, with its secret power, perversity, unity, and mysticism. The critics were divided about the horror of a mother's murdering her drug-addicted son: To some, the act was unforgivable; to others, the woman exhibited a mother's utmost love and courage. What none of the critics could have foreseen, however, was that Morrison's portrait of the drug-addicted son was an omen of ghetto life in the coming decades.
