Upon the original publication of Beloved John Leonard wrote in the Los Angeles Times: I can't
imagine American literature without it. Nearly two decades later The New York Times chose
Beloved as the best American novel of the previous fifty years. Toni Morrison's magnificent
Pulitzer Prize-winning work-first published in 1987-brought the wrenching experience of slavery
into the literature of our time enlarging our comprehension of America's original sin. Set in
post-Civil War Ohio it is the story of Sethe an escaped slave who has lost a husband and
buried a child who has withstood savagery and not gone mad. Sethe who now lives in a small
house on the edge of town with her daughter Denver her mother-in-law Baby Suggs and a
disturbing mesmerizing apparition who calls herself Beloved. Sethe works at beating back the
past but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in her memory in Denver's fear of the
world outside the house in the sadness that consumes Baby Suggs in the arrival of Paul D a
fellow former slave and most powerfully in Beloved whose childhood belongs to the hideous
logic of slavery and who has now come from the place over there to claim retribution for what
she lost and for what was taken from her. Sethe's struggle to keep Beloved from gaining
possession of the present-and to throw off the long-dark legacy of the past-is at the center of
this spellbinding novel. But it also moves beyond its particulars combining imagination and
the vision of legend with the unassailable truths of history.
