Toni Morrison was 56 when Beloved was published in 1987. She had been thinking about the book — and about a real woman named Margaret Garner — for almost a decade. When it finally came out, it did something few novels do: it changed the shape of the canon around it.
The novel does not begin with action. It begins with a line from Romans 9:25:
"I will call them my people, / which were not my people; / and her beloved, / which was not beloved."