The Bluest Eye. by MORRISON, Toni - 1970

New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, , 1970. Octavo. Original blue cloth-backed grey boards, titles to spine in silver. With the dust jacket. Light fading to spine ends, very faint foxing to book block edges and endpapers, occasional creasing to top outer tips, a very good copy in the bright, price-clipped, jacket with a little creasing to spine ends and flap edges, short closed tear to foot of front panel. First edition, first printing, of Morrison's highly influential debut novel, in notably attractive condition. The Bluest Eye "cut a new path through the American literary landscape by placing black girls at the center of the story" and its lasting importance was recognised when Morrison received the Nobel Prize for her contributions to literature in 1993 (The New Yorker, 27 January 2020). Morrison wrote The Bluest Eye whilst working as a senior fiction editor at Random House and woke at 4 am each morning to write. It was favourably reviewed upon release in The New York Times by John Leonard, who praised Morrison's writing style as being "a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry" (The New York Times, 13 November 1970).