SOURCE: "Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Reviewers," in Midwestern Miscellany, Vol. XVIII, 1990, pp. 45-57.

In the following essay, Atlas discusses the differences between various reviews of Beloved and suggests that the novel's subject and design pose unusual difficulties for most critics.

Even before the publication of Beloved, Toni Morrison was clearly a writer's writer. Toni Cade Bambara, author of Gorilla, My Love and The Salt-Eaters, herself an impressive crafter of fiction, wrote of Morrison's fourth novel, Tar Baby: "That voice of hers is so sure. She lures you in, locks the door and encloses you in a special, very particular universe—all in the first three pages." Outrage among black writers was so great after Beloved failed to win the National Book Award during the fall of 1987 that forty-eight black writers, among them, June Jordon, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, Paule Marshall, John Wideman and Alice...