The origin of the trilogy is Greek, first appearing as a series of three tragedies by the author Aeschylus for the Dionysian Drama Festival in Athens in the fifth century. Morrison, who performed classical drama at Howard University in the 1950s, was familiar with the work of Aeschylus and the way trilogies could build tension and explore complex ideas. However, Morrison’s trilogy departs from traditional examples in the genre. The three works do not follow the same characters or even the same periods. Instead, they expand upon a theme of love and its connection to violence and trauma within a history of Black experience in American spaces.

All three works in the trilogy—Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise—are inspired by real people and events. Beloved was inspired by a newspaper article about Margaret Garner who killed one of her children in 1856 rather than see her child enter a life of slavery. Jazz was born from a photograph of a woman who bled to death rather than reveal the identity of her lover who shot her. This photograph, taken by James VanDerZee appears in The Harlem Book of the Dead, a 1978 collection of funerary portraits. Beloved’s fictional town of Haven is modeled after Black settlements which formed after Reconstruction.