Toni Morrison. Beloved: a Novel. New York: Knopf, 1987

Lehman also spoke at length about the importance of Beloved, a Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Cornell graduate and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison (MFA 1955). Beloved, he suggested, “leads us to wonder in new ways about what it means to be a person, to be alive, to be a slave, to love someone else. It makes us wonder whether, and to what extent, our responses to such questions are conditioned by our races, and to what extent our responses transcend race and are more purely human.”