Beloved
“At first, I just didn’t want to go there. It was too painful. And then I thought that if they had lived through it, I could spend a few years writing about it.”
Appearing like a detonation on the literary scene of 1987, Beloved explores the great taboo of slavery.
First edition of Toni Morrison’s masterpiece.
A very fine copy signed by the author, preserved in its original binding and dust jacket.
Octavo, 275 pp., (1) leaf, publisher's cloth, original dust jacket.
235 x 160 mm.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved: A Novel.
New York, Knopf, 1987.
First edition of Toni Morrison’s masterpiece.
Copy signed by the author.
A landmark work in Toni Morrison’s oeuvre, Beloved is a remarkably powerful novel, awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and, ten years later, adapted for the screen by Jonathan Demme.
The first Black woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 for, according to the Academy, "piecing together the history of African Americans, fragment by fragment", Toni Morrison spent fifty years giving words to the unspeakable: the hold of the "color line" on American society, from slavery to everyday racism to segregation. A literary explosion when it appeared in 1987, her novel Beloved explores the great taboo of slavery and the deep scars it left on those who endured it for four centuries.
Sethe and her family have lived with the ghost of Beloved for years. Sethe killed her two-year-old daughter—so that she would never be a slave like her. Since then, the Civil War has ended, and in her small Ohio town, Sethe may be free, but remains haunted by what she did. So when a stranger calling herself Beloved knocks at her door, Sethe is forced more than ever to confront her past.
The fifth novel by Toni Morrison, this work is a lyrical tour-de-force, exploring the traumas of slavery as few other books have done. At once an ode to motherhood and a re-creation of the horror of a never-closed chapter in American history, this novel achieved worldwide success.
Throughout her work, Toni Morrison, also a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature for her body of work, explores the condition of Black people in the United States at different times in history.
A beautiful copy signed by the author, preserved in its original binding and dust jacket.
