Toni Morrison’s debut novel immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family — Pauline, Cholly, Sam and Pecola — in post-Depression 1940s Ohio. Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows. At once intimate and expansive, unsparing in its truth-telling, The Bluest Eye shows how the past savagely defines the present.