In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietitude of every day life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must first get out of the way.

In 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In May 2006 The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best American novel publiToni Morrisond in the previous twenty-five years. I have no idea what his real instincts are in terms of race.

Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18 1931) is an American novelist editor and professor. She won the Nobel Prize in 1993 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Beloved. She also was commissioned to write the libretto for a new opera Margaret Garner first performed in 2005.