Beloved is a 1987 novel by American novelist Toni Morrison. Set in the period after the American Civil War, the novel tells the story of a dysfunctional family of formerly enslaved people whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. The narrative of Beloved derives from the life of Margaret Garner, an enslaved person in the slave state of Kentucky who escaped and fled to the free state of Ohio in 1856. Garner was subject to capture under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and when U.S. marshals broke into the cabin where she and her husband had barricaded themselves, she was attempting to kill her children—and had already killed her youngest daughter—in hopes of sparing them from being returned to slavery. Morrison's main inspiration for the novel was an account of the event titled "A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child" in an 1856 newspaper article initially published in the American Baptist and reproduced in The Black Book, an anthology of texts of Black history and culture that Morrison had edited in 1974. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction a year after its publication, and was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award. A survey of writers and literary critics compiled by The New York Times ranked it as the best work of American fiction from 1981 to 2006. It was adapted as a 1998 movie of the same name, starring Oprah Winfrey. Background The book's dedication reads "Sixty Million and more", referring to the Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the Atlantic slave trade. The book's epigraph is Romans 9:25. Plot summary Beloved begins in 1873 in Cincinnati, Ohio, with Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, and her 18-year-old daughter, Denver, who live at 124 Bluestone Road. The site has been haunted for years by what they believe is the ghost of Sethe's eldest daughter. Denver is shy, friendless, and housebound. Sethe's sons, Howard and Buglar, ran away from home by the age of 13, which she believes was due to the ghost. Baby Suggs, the mother of Sethe's husband, Halle, died soon after the boys fled, eight years before the start of the novel. One day, Paul D, one of the enslaved men from Sweet Home, the plantation where Sethe, Halle, Baby Suggs, and several others were once enslaved, arrives at Sethe's home. He forces out the