York Notes on Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' Study Notes

by Toni Morrison

Key * Study methods * Introduction to the text * Summaries with critical notes * Themes and techniques * Textual analysis of key passages * Author biography * Historical and literary background * Modern and historical critical approaches * Chronology * Glossary of literary terms

Genres: Banned Books, Classics

Paperback

Published January 1, 1999

About the author

Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. Morrison earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor for fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her novel Beloved was made into a film in 1998. Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience.
The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities, in 1996. She was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on May 29, 2012. She received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. Morrison was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020.

Reviews

[Elly Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

What I had was an audiobook, a story, not a text. Rough subject material, hard to believe how things were. We can only hope they are better now. Very sad.

[Suzanne Skelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pulitzer prize winner, " Beloved" is a masterpiece. A brutally powerful, mesmerizing story that is one of Morrison's finest works.

The story of Sethe. Proud and beautiful she escaped from slavery but continues to be haunted by it's heritage. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath ,this great novel is a dazzlingly achievement and spellbinding reading experience.

[Valour · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a hard book to read. It's an unflinching, unfaltering look at the damage slavery wrought (and still does) upon those men, women and children who were enslaved. It is not a comfortable book, nor one to easily read and while away some time. It is important, and should (along with Maya Angelou and Alice Walker) be mandatory for all white people to read, to acknowledge and to work damnded hard on the internalised racism of which we are all guilty.