The Color Purple
(Alice Walker)

Alice Walker grew up in a small town in Georgia, in the mid-1900’s. Her parents were sharecroppers, and she grew up hearing of the struggles and oppression of African-Americans in the sharecropping system. Seeing how black people were treated in the South, Walker threw herself heavily into the civil rights movement.

Although she was privileged to go to good colleges and to travel, she did experience her share of hardships, which probably helped her to write many of her stories. She was shot in the eye, accidentally, by one of her brothers, which caused her to be half blind and often discriminated against throughout her adolescence. Also, she found herself pregnant when she returned from her semester in Uganda as an exchange student and briefly considered suicide before finally deciding to have the baby aborted.

“The Color Purple” is a story about several black women living in the south who are going through various degrees of struggle in their lives. It is probable that Walker drew inspiration from her real life tribulations, her involvement in the civil rights movement and her experience with the injustice faced by sharecroppers.

Though many African American male critics have panned the novel, stating that it paints a negative picture of black men and feeds into stereotypes, black women see it as empowering and inspiring.

Walker has become a favorite author for women all over the world, regardless of race, and one of the most successful and well-known contemporary American authors.