When author Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize in 1993, the prize committee noted that Morrison "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."

Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved is set in the time period just after the Civil War. It explores the devastating psychological impact of slavery on its characters, who have escaped plantation life for Ohio but are unable to outrun the memories that haunt them. The novel was inspired by the real-life story of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who upon capture murdered her youngest child rather than allow her daughter to return to a life of slavery.