Beloved is Toni Morrison's fifth novel, and is considered by many to be her best work. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1988, the year after its release. It is the story of Sethe, a woman who escaped slavery but cannot escape its tragic consequences, and about the struggles of her fellow former slaves to find peace and forge new identities out of the horrors they endured. Beloved was informed by real historical events, including the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which declared that runaway slaves could be recaptured by their masters even if they made it into a free state, and the story of Margaret Garner, a woman who, facing recapture, killed her own children with the belief...
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