Toni Morrison's moving novel Beloved was named the best American novel in the last 25 years in a poll conducted by the New York Times.
When about 200 prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary experts were asked to identify "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years", a majority of them voted for Morrison's fourth novel, the paper reported.
The novel, dealing with the aftermath of the slavery and Civil War, has won numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Awards and NBF Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters apart from the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The runner-ups in the contest are Don DeLillo's post-modern epic Underworld (1987), Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy, Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels (1960-1995) by John Updike and Philip Roth's American Pastoral (1997).
DeLillo with White Noise and Libra and Roth with The CounterlifeCounterlife, Operation Shylock, Sabbath's Theater, The Human Stain and The Plot Against America dominate the list of the works that received multiple votes.