Who wrote Beloved, the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner?

Toni Morrison wrote Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Published in 1987, the novel follows Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman living in Cincinnati after the American Civil War, whose household is haunted by the legacy of slavery and by a mysterious figure called Beloved. Morrison combines historical fiction, memory, shifting perspectives, and supernatural elements to show how private trauma and national history remain intertwined.

The novel was inspired in part by the story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who escaped to Ohio in 1856. Morrison’s dedication, “Sixty Million and more,” points to the vast human loss caused by the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. The Pulitzer jury described the book as a work destined to become an American classic.

A common mix-up is Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, which won the Fiction Pulitzer in 1983. Morrison later received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, five years after Beloved’s Pulitzer.