The Bluest Eye.

New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,, 1970. Inscribed by the "towering novelist of the Black experience" First edition, first printing, inscribed by the author on the title page, "To Paul Bartel, Regards, Toni Morrison". Bartel (1938-2000) was an actor and director, best known for his black comedy Eating Raoul (1982). Morrison wrote the novel, her debut, "in stolen moments between her day job as a book editor and her life as the single mother of two young sons" (Fox). It received little critical attention on publication, though the distinguished critic John Leonard was unstinting in his praise, describing Morrison's prose as "so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry" (Leonard). It has since been widely praised for "cut[ting] a new path through the American literary landscape by placing black girls at the center of the story" (Als). Its lasting importance was recognized in 1993, when Morrison's received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Octavo. Original blue quarter cloth, spine lettered in silver, grey paper-covered sides. With dust jacket. Book label of William A. Strutz (1934-2024) to front pastedown. Spine ends lightly sunned; jacket unclipped, lightly toned as usual, vertical creases to flaps as often: a near-fine copy in near-fine jacket. Hilton Als, "Toni Morrison's Profound and Unrelenting Vision", New Yorker, 27 January 2020; Margalit Fox, "Toni Morrison, Towering Novelist of the Black Experience, Dies at 88", New York Times, 6 August 2019; John Leonard, "Three First Novels on Race", New York Times, 13 November 1970.