Toni Morrison's novel about Sethe, a woman who escaped slavery, and the ghost of the daughter she killed to keep her from it. For readers who want the plot in order, the history behind it, and what the book says about memory.
Author · 1 summary
Toni Morrison
American novelist and editor
- Born
- 18 February 1931
- Died
- 5 August 2019 (aged 88)
- Birthplace
- Lorain, Ohio, United States
- Nationality
- American
- Occupation
- Novelist, Editor, Professor
- Known for
- Beloved and the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature
- Website
- tonimorrisonsociety.org
- Wikipedia
- Read the article
About Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, a steel town on Lake Erie. She studied English at Howard University and earned a master's degree at Cornell, then taught at Texas Southern University and Howard.
In the late 1960s she joined Random House in New York and became the first Black woman to be a senior fiction editor there. She published books by Black writers such as Angela Davis and Gayl Jones. She wrote in the early mornings, and her first novel, The Bluest Eye, appeared in 1970.
Beloved (1987) draws on the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who killed her daughter rather than see her returned to slavery. In the novel, a formerly enslaved woman named Sethe is haunted by the child she killed. It argues that the memory of slavery cannot be buried and must be faced. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Some schools have challenged it over its violence and sexual content.
She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, taught at Princeton University until 2006 and died in 2019, aged 88.
Books by Toni Morrison
New books, occasionally