The Bluest Eye

By Toni Morrison

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Toni Morrison's first novel, published in 1970, is set in Lorain, Ohio, in the early 1940s. Pecola Breedlove, an eleven-year-old Black girl, prays for blue eyes, believing they would make her beautiful and loved. Much of the story is told by Claudia MacTeer, a girl whose family takes Pecola in for a time. Morrison shows how a culture that prizes whiteness, and a family under great strain, shape a child's sense of her own worth.

Recommended by 4 people

• Oprah Winfrey
• Diane Rehm
• Adam Sessler
• Barack Obama: “you can't go wrong by reading or re-reading the collected works of Toni Morrison. Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Sula, everything else — they're transcendent, all of them.”