Toni Morrison, Beloved
(New York: Knopf, 1987)In 2006 The New York Times asked around two hundred writers, critics, editors,
“and other literary sages” to name “the single best work of American fiction
published in the last 25 years.” Toni Morrison’s Beloved received the most votes
by a significant margin. In an essay accompanying the results, critic A. O. Scott
notes that the outcome was not a surprise, given the extent to which Beloved has
“inserted itself into the American canon more completely than any of its potential
rivals” (New York Times, 21 May 2006). It is widely taught on college campuses,
received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1988, and was cited in the announcement
of its author as a Nobel Laureate in literature in 1993.
Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, on 18 Febru-
ary 1931 to working-class parents. In interviews over the years, Morrison has
discussed her father’s dislike and distrust of white people (he witnessed two
lynchings as a young man in the South) and the major role storytelling, especially
black folklore, played in her family’s home life. After graduating from Howard
University with a major in English and a minor in classics in 1953, she received
her master’s degree in English from Cornell University in 1955, where she wrote
her thesis on the theme of death in works by William Faulkner and Virginia
Woolf. She married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, in 1958; they divorced
in 1964. They have two sons, Harold Ford (born in 1961) and Slade Kevin (born
in 1964). After teaching at Texas Southern University and then Howard, Mor-
rison began a career as a textbook, then trade-book, editor for Random House.
In that position she promoted the careers of many African American writers,
including Toni Cade Bambara, Claude Brown, Angela Davis, and Gayl Jones. She
also oversaw production of The Black Book (1974), edited by Middleton A. Harris,
Ernest Smith, Morris Levitt, and Roger Furman, a landmark compilation of pho-
tographs, advertisements, newspaper articles, letters, handbills, posters, pictures of
quilts, and other representations of the African American experience. It reprints
the original accounts of Margaret Garner, the slave woman who killed her child to
keep her from being taken back into slavery (the historical incident that inspired
Beloved ) and a photograph of a young girl in a coffin that inspired Jazz (1992);
shot by a jealous lover at party, the girl refused to name him so that he would have
time to escape. In 1987 Morrison was named the Robert F. Goheen Professor in
the Council of Humanities at Princeton University, thus becoming the first black
woman writer to hold a named chair at an Ivy League university. She retired from
that position in 2006.
Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), generated immediate praise for
its lyrical prose (words frequently encountered in Morrison reviews and criticism).
That novel is the powerful story of a young, poor black girl who believes that hav-
ing blue eyes would solve the deep problems in her family life and reverse the lack
of regard shown by her community. Its 1970 publication coincided with a time
when many Postmodern writers and critics were claiming that all the old stories
and forms were used up and the only literary endeavor remaining was to experi-