Beloved

Beloved · published 1987 · ISBN 9781400033416

Toni Morrison — Toni Morrison (1931 – 2019) — United States, writing in English. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

“who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality” — The Nobel Committee citation

About Toni Morrison

American novelist and the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her prose, at once fierce and richly musical, digs deep into the memory, trauma, and identity of African Americans.

How it came to be

Published in 1987, the novel drew on the true story of Margaret Garner, a fugitive enslaved mother who chose to kill her child rather than see her recaptured. The book won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize and became a cornerstone of American literature on the memory of slavery.

What Beloved is about

Sethe, a former slave living in post-Civil War Ohio, is haunted by the baby daughter she herself killed to keep her from being dragged back into slavery. When a strange young woman calling herself Beloved appears, the buried past returns to demand a debt of memory that can never be repaid.

Analysis & legacy

Beloved turns a real and harrowing event, an enslaved mother who kills her child to spare it a life in chains, into an elegy of memory and trauma. Morrison writes in a prose that is musical, fractured, and circling like a wound that will not close, in order to say what history books cannot: that slavery is not only the lash but a generational cut in the soul, in the bond between mother and child, in the very capacity to love. The ghost Beloved returns to collect a debt of memory, forcing the whole community to face its past. Winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize and voted the best American novel of the previous quarter-century, it is a cornerstone of American literature on the legacy of slavery.

Themes: Memory and trauma · Slavery · Motherhood · Community · Ghosts and the past

Rating: 3.9/5 from 73 ratings (Open Library).

What critics say

• Ms. Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. — Margaret Atwood, The New York Times
• Voted the best American novel of the past 25 years; winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. — The New York Times, 2006 survey

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