The first two years after Cornell, Morrison taught humanities and English at Texas Southern University. She then worked for eight years as an English instructor at Howard University. Her two most promising students were civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael and Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land. The year after she left teaching, Morrison gravitated toward writing. She joined a monthly literary symposium in 1962 and contributed stories that she had begun in high school. Chief among them was a story she read aloud about a black girl who wanted to make up for her shortcomings by petitioning God for blue eyes.
By that time, Morrison's 1957 marriage to Jamaican architect Harold Morrison had produced a son, Harold Ford, born in 1962. She ended the marriage in 1965, returned to Lorain for a year and a half (during which her second child, Slade Kevin, was born), and renewed her literary outlet as an antidote to loneliness. Explaining her urge to write, she emphasizes a need for "books that I had wanted to read. No one had written them yet, so I wrote them."
From 1965 to 1983, Morrison served as a textbook editor at Random House, working from her home in Syracuse, New York. The move from Ohio alarmed her mother, who admonished, "You don't have anybody there." Self-assured of her ambitions, Morrison replied, "You take the village with you. There is no need for the community if you have a sense of it inside."
