Beloved

The Resource Beloved
Label
Beloved
Statement of responsibility
a novel by Toni Morrison
Title variation
Beloved a novel
Creator
Author
Subject
Genre
Language
  • eng
  • eng
Summary
After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the decade. A brutally powerful, mesmerizing story. At the center of Toni Morrison's fifth novel, which earned her the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is an almost unspeakable act of horror and heroism: a woman brutally kills her infant daughter rather than allow her to be enslaved. The woman is Sethe, and the novel traces her journey from slavery to freedom during and immediately following the Civil War. Woven into this circular, mesmerizing narrative are the horrible truths of Sethe's past: the incredible cruelties she endured as a slave, and the hardships she suffered in her journey north to freedom. Just as Sethe finds the past too painful to remember, and the future just "a matter of keeping the past at bay," her story is almost too painful to read. Yet Morrison manages to imbue the wreckage of her characters' lives with compassion, humanity, and humor. Part ghost story, part history lesson, part folk tale, Beloved finds beauty in the unbearable, and lets us all see the enduring promise of hope that lies in anyones future
Awards note
  • Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 1988.
  • Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations, 1988.
  • Frederic G. Melcher Book Award, 1988.
Cataloging source
DLC
Dewey number
813/.54
Index
no index present
Interest level
High School
LC call number
PS3563.O8749
LC item number
B4 1987
Literary form
novels
Reading level
  • 7.3 :
  • 8.1
Series statement
Borzoi book
Study program name
  • Accelerated Reader AR
  • Reading Counts RC
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