Cry, the Beloved Country Cry, the Beloved Country Cry, the Beloved Country is a novel by Alan Paton, published in 1948. American publisher Bennett Cerf remarked at that year's meeting of the American Booksellers Association that there had been "only three novels published since the first of the year that were worth reading… "Cry, The Beloved Country", "The Ides of March", and "The Naked and the Dead"." Two cinema adaptations of the book have been made, the first in 1951 and the second in 1995. The novel was also adapted as a musical called "Lost in the Stars" (1949), with a book by the
Beloved (novel) trade as a Holocaust-like genocide. Others, while concurring that "Beloved" is at times overwritten, have lauded the novel as a profound and extraordinary act of imagination. Noting the work's mythic dimensions and political focus, these commentators have treated the novel as an exploration of family, trauma, and the repression of memory as well as an attempt to restore the historical record and give voice to the collective memory of African Americans. Indeed, critics and Morrison herself have indicated that the controversial epigraph to "Beloved", "sixty million and more", is drawn from a number of studies on the African slave trade