Morrison's Beloved

Beloved, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1987, is a novel by Toni Morrison set in Ohio in 1873. Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman who escaped from a Kentucky plantation, lives in a house haunted by the ghost of her baby daughter, whom she killed rather than let be returned to slavery. A young woman who calls herself Beloved arrives and seems to be that child returned. The story moves between the present and the memories of life at 'Sweet Home' plantation.¹⁴

Morrison, an editor at Random House and then a professor, drew on the real case of Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in 1856 and, when recaptured, killed her young daughter. She wrote Beloved to give an inner life to people the historical record mostly reduces to numbers. The book blends realism with the supernatural and is told in fragments, to show how trauma returns. It is dedicated to 'Sixty Million and more', for the victims of the slave trade.¹⁴

Beloved lost the 1987 National Book Award, and in January 1988 forty-eight Black writers and critics published a protest in the New York Times Book Review that Morrison had never received that honor or the Pulitzer Prize. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction later that year. Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the first Black woman to do so. A 2006 New York Times survey of writers named Beloved the best American novel of the previous 25 years, and a 1998 film starred Oprah Winfrey. It is also a frequent target of school challenges.²³⁴