postscript

It makes me happy to read this article about Toni Morrison's novel Beloved for a variety of reasons. One, it is a beautiful novel. Two, I love reading anything on Slate. When I was in college, my former and late professor, Larry Cave, pushed through having a preceptorial on Beloved. Big deal, you might say, except this was 1989ish and this was St. John's College, bastion of dead white men books. Having a contemporary novel in a St. John's preceptorial, particularly one like Beloved, was pretty outrageous. We all loved the book and Larry Cave was a wonderful tutor, probably too wonderful for St. John's, in my opinion. He died just a few years after I graduated, from AIDS. But I'll never forget that precept.