Its text is rapidly coated with thick layers of critical terminology and historical background. It is the occasion of grand lectures and intense seminar discussions. Nearly everyone who encounters it now does so in the classroom. Precisely because the novel’s canonicity has never been in dispute, though, Beloved is almost never read to be enjoyed. “The thing is, now I can’t imagine American literature without it.” “If there were any doubts about stature as a preeminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation,” Margaret Atwood burbled in the New York Times Book Review, “ Beloved will put them to rest.” John Leonard joined the chorus in the Los Angeles Times: “ Beloved belongs on the highest shelf of American literature, even if half a dozen canonized white boys have to be elbowed off,” he said. The novel’s status as a masterpiece was treated as a given even before Beloved was released to the general public in September 1987. Professors have taken up Beloved like a cause and have elucidated it so profusely-along with Twain’s great work, only The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, and Waldenhave amassed larger bodies of scholarship-that its place among the handful of American classics is assured. “When a writer is supported by a sufficient body of scholarship,” wrote the critic Yvor Winters, “a very little philosophical elucidation will suffice to establish him in the scholarly world as a writer whose greatness is self-evident.” And that is pretty much what has happened with Morrison. Its next closest rival, The Great Gatsby, has yet to reach 700 almost nine decades after its first edition. It has been the subject of more than 700 items listed in the MLA International Bibliography-reviews, essays, chapters, monographs, Ph.D. Or, at least Toni Morrison’s Belovedmust be considered the most important American novel in over a century if critical and academic attention is the gauge.

Twenty-five years ago this fall the most important American novel since Huckleberry Finnwas published.

Toni morrison on beloved