Beloved
Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved. Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it is alive in all of them. It keeps Denver fearful of straying from the house. It fuels the sadness that has settled into Baby Suggs' "desolated center where the self that was no self made its home." And to Sethe, the past makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in memories that both haunt and soothe her...in the arrival of Paul D ("There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and wan
Where Beloved keeps showing up
13 of our editors' lists feature this novel.
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What you might want to know about Beloved
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In 1873 rural Ohio, formerly enslaved Sethe lives with her surviving daughter in a house haunted by her dead baby girl. A young woman calling herself Beloved walks up out of the water and changes that household forever.
Yes. Beloved won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Toni Morrison was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, in part for Beloved.
Beloved is fictional but inspired by Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who killed her own daughter in 1856 to prevent her from being returned to slavery. Toni Morrison researched the case extensively.
Beloved is structurally complex, with non-linear chronology, shifting perspectives, and difficult subject matter including slavery, infanticide, and trauma. The prose is poetic but demanding. It is widely taught in college literature courses.
Beloved was written by Toni Morrison, published in 1987 by Vintage International.
Beloved is 330 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Beloved takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Beloved is a standalone novel by Toni Morrison, not part of a series.
Beloved is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
