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Introduction

Beloved (1987) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. The novel, her fifth, is loosely based on the life and legal case of the slave Margaret Garner, about whom Morrison later wrote in the opera Margaret Garner (2005). The book's epigraph reads: "Sixty Million and more," by which Morrison refers to the estimated number of slaves who died in the slave trade.

In 1998 the novel was adapted into a film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey.

A survey of writers and literary critics conducted by The New York Times found Beloved the best work of American fiction of the past 25 years; it garnered 15 of 125 votes, finishing ahead of Don DeLillo's Underworld (11 votes), Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (8) and John Updike's Rabbit series (8).^[1] The results appeared in The New York Times Book Review on May 21, 2006. ^[2]

Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.^[3]