Beloved

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Beloved is a 1987 novel by American author Toni Morrison that examines the destructive legacy of slavery through the life of Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman living in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1873. The narrative is inspired by the true 1856 story of Margaret Garner, who escaped from a Kentucky plantation to Ohio and killed her young daughter to prevent her recapture into slavery. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Beloved won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and helped cement Morrison's standing prior to her 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. Sethe's story is rooted in the historical case of Margaret Garner, who fled Kentucky in 1856 with her husband Robert and their children before being cornered by slave catchers and law officers in Ohio. In Morrison's literary sequence, Beloved follows Tar Baby (1981) and precedes Jazz (1992), forming the opening installment of a loose thematic trilogy. The novel's setting at 124 Bluestone Road in 1873 Ohio bridges pre-Civil War bondage and Reconstruction-era trauma, illustrating how memory and grief persist after legal emancipation.

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