Toni Morrison's Research Notes for Beloved

"...I’ve written on scraps of paper, in hotels on hotel stationery, in automobiles. If it arrives, you know. If you know it really has come, then you have to put it down."

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) left behind a lot of paper—nearly 400 boxes of material. She donated it all to Princeton University, where she had been a Professor for seventeen years. Much of this post (and this week’s postscript) is based on research I did on Morrison in Princeton’s archives.

I walked past this wall on the way to see Morrison’s papers, Fires…