The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

The Bluest Eye, first published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature and the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for her novel Beloved.

This is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove -- a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others -- who prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.