Beloved is without a doubt the most read, most often taught, and most often written about among Toni Morrison's six novels. In this casebook of previously published essays, the editors have collected, from among dozens of excellent possibilities, what they consider to be seven of the best in the group. In addition to the essays by critics wee steeped in Morrison scholarship, the correction intrudes three additional documents: a poem by the well-known nineteenth-century writer and women's activist, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, that publicly responds to the incident in which the slave mother, Margaret Garner, murdered her third to save her from slavery-the very incident Morrison fictionalizes in her novel; a white abolitionist's trace put together from contemporaneous newspaper accounts of the murder; and in an effort to capture the small portion of the oral quality so prominent in the work, a "Conversation" among three Morrison scholars about the meaning and impact of Beloved.