October’s Anisfield-Wolf Book Club selection is 1988 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Fiction winner, Beloved by Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison has said that Beloved is the first novel in a trilogy about love. The second novel in that trilogy, Jazz, was published in 1992. Set in New York during the Harlem Renaissance, the novel pieces together the story of a love triangle in a narrative form that imitates the rhythms of jazz music. The third novel, Paradise, was published in 1998. It portrays the lives of the townspeople of Ruby, Oklahoma, who believe their community is “the one all-black town worth the pain,” and the women who inhabit the abandoned convent just outside town, whom the townspeople wish to exclude from their Eden. In 1993 Morrison received the Nobel Prize in literature for her six novels to that date. She was the first African American and the first black woman of any nationality ever to receive that prize.
About Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, a small, racially mixed steel town. Her grandparents were all originally from the South, and Morrison credits her family with giving her a rich foundation in the language and rhythms of African American culture. She has said she was born into a family of storytellers, and considers her father’s folktales and her mother’s singing as examples of the uniquely black language she absorbed as a child. After graduating with honors from Lorain public schools, Morrison received a bachelor’s degree from Howard University in 1953. In 1955 she earned a master’s degree in English from Cornell University, where she wrote her thesis on alienation in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. She taught at Texas Southern University for two years before accepting a teaching position at Howard.
While teaching at Howard, she married Jamaican architect Harold Morrison and gave birth to two sons. She later said it was the “powerlessness” she felt during her years as a wife and a mother of small children that led her to begin writing. In 1964 Morrison and her husband divorced, and she took a job in Syracuse, New York, as a textbook editor for Random House. In 1968 she moved to Random House’s trade division in Manhattan, becoming their first black woman senior editor. There, she focused on black authors and edited books by Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and Muhammad Ali. Morrison also continued writing her own fiction at night, after her sons were asleep, and in 1970 published her first novel, The Bluest Eye.
Through all of these works Morrison has had a tremendous impact on the American and the African American literary landscapes. Her novels are widely accessible to readers and internationally praised for the quality of their prose, yet they remain dedicated to exploring nuances of African American culture and language. In Black Women Writers, a 1984 book by poet Mari Evans, Morrison states that to her the best art “is unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time,” a standard many readers believe she has met in all of her work.
Read more by Toni Morrison
Book Discussion Questions
Whether you are hosting your next book club or would simply like some questions to guide your reading, we curated a selection of questions to consider while you read Beloved.
Celebrate Toni Morrison all year!
From February 18, 2026 through February 18, 2027, Ohio will celebrate the life, literature, and legacy of Toni Morrison, Lorain, Ohio native and the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ohio Celebrates Toni Morrison is designed and led by Literary Cleveland with Ohio Humanities, Ohioana Library Association, and the Toni Morrison Society.