THIS WEEK IN

SEPTEMBER 14 — SEPTEMBER 20

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is published.

Famously, Toni Morrison’s 1987 masterpiece Beloved was inspired by a true story, which Morrison, then an editor at Random House, gleaned from a newspaper clipping that she included in a 1974 anthology entitled The Black Book. The short article recounted the story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman in Kansas, who killed her young daughter rather than let her live in slavery. The idea became the seed of what would become Beloved, in which a woman named Sethe makes the same choice, and winds up, after her emancipation, haunted by the ghost of her child.

“It seemed important to me that the action in Beloved—the fact of infanticide—be immediately known, but deferred, unseen,” Morrison told The Paris Review in 1993.

I wanted to give the reader all the information and the consequences surrounding the act, while avoiding engorging myself or the reader with the violence itself. I remember writing the sentence where Sethe cuts the throat of the child very, very late in the process of writing the book. I remember getting up from the table and walking outside for a long time—walking around the yard and coming back and revising it a little bit and going back out and in and rewriting the sentence over and over again . . . Each time I fixed that sentence so that it was exactly right, or so I thought, but then I would be unable to sit there and would have to go away and come back. I thought that the act itself had to be not only buried but also understated, because if the language was going to compete with the violence itself it would be obscene or pornographic.

Beloved was published by Alfred A. Knopf on September 16, 1987. It was a finalist for the National Book Award but lost to Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story, a book now mostly known for somehow winning a National Book Award over Beloved. 48 Black writers, including Maya Angelou, Angela Davis, Ernest J. Gaines, June Jordan, and John Edgar Wideman, signed a letter, which was then published in The New York Times, protesting the decision, which they argued was a result of “oversight and harmful whimsy,” and celebrating Morrison.

Three months later, the book did, in fact, win the Pulitzer Prize, and has since become an immovable, widely influential part of the American literary canon. It “has become the most widely held US novel in libraries and one of the most written-about US novels in scholarly journals,” wrote Dan Sinykin. “It influenced the priorities of African American literary studies for the coming decades.” Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. In 2006, The New York Times asked “a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages” to name the "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." The book named most often? Beloved.

MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM

Why Toni Morrison Left Publishing

“You Don’t Know Anything.” And Other Writing Advice from Toni Morrison

75 Covers of Toni Morrison’s Beloved From Around the World

CLASSIC QUOTE:

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”

–Toni Morrison, Beloved

In other (old)

news this week

Hours after finishing the Paradiso, Dante dies of malaria (September 14, 1321) • Sir Thomas Overbury is murdered as the result of a scandal caused by his snarky poem “A Wife” (September 14, 1613) • Francis Scott Key, American lawyer and amateur poet, writes a poem called “The Defence of Fort M'Henry”—which you now know as“The Star-Spangled Banner” (September 14, 1814) • P. G. Wodehouse's short story "Extricating Young Gussie," the first to introduce the legendary literary trickster