Beloved (novel) Critical Essay | Critical Review by Walter Clemons

SOURCE: "A Gravestone of Memories," in Newsweek, Vol. CX, No. 13, September 28, 1987, pp. 74-5.

Clemons is an American critic and short story writer. In the following review, he praises Beloved as a masterpiece of psychological and historical evocation which re-creates the "interior life" of black slaves "with a moving intensity no novelist has even approached before."

In 1855 a runaway slave from Kentucky named Margaret Garner was tracked by her owner to Cincinnati, where she had taken refuge with her freed mother-in-law. Cornered, she tried to kill her four children. Afterward, she was quite serene about what she had done. A newspaper account of this stark event taken from a documentary sourcebook stayed in Toni Morrison's mind over the years. Now it has become the germ of a magnificent novel.

In a lecture last year [1986], Morrison spoke about omissions in slave narratives written for abolitionist readers during...
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