Beloved

Winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Black History Month

Staff recommendations, guest essays, and curated reading lists.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past.

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present.

Combining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.

“A brutally powerful, mesmerizing story. . . . Read it and tremble.” People

“Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature.” New York Review of Books

"There is something great in Beloved...a play of human voices, consciously exalted, perversely stressed, yet holding true. It gets you." The New Yorker

"Compelling....Morrison shakes that brilliant kaleidoscope of hers again, and the story of pain, endurance, poetry and power she is born to tell comes right out." The Village Voice

“Toni Morrison’s finest work. . . . [It] sets her apart [and] displays her prodigious talent.” Chicago Sun-Times

Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in Rockland County, New York, and Princeton, New Jersey.