Alice Walker, The Color Purple

Pulitzer Prize juror Peter Prescott heralded Alice Walker’s The Color Purple as a work
of “permanent importance.” Indeed, it is said to have transformed the literary landscape in
terms of its representation of “authentic folk voice” and was instrumental in establishing
Walker as a canonical figure in American letters. The Color Purple has sold over five million
copies, has been translated into more than two dozen languages, was awarded the 1983
American Book Award in fiction, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, making Alice
Walker the first black woman to win this prestigious award. Born in Winds Chapel, Eatonton,
Georgia, to a sharecropping family in 1944, Alice Malsenior Walker attended Spelman
College in Atlanta (founded in 1881 as a school for recently emancipated black women) until
her junior year. Always unpretentious, Walker also possessed a rebellious spirit and resisted
those of the institution, Walker withdrew from Spelman, a move she attributes to feeling
“alienated by the naivete and passiveness of the middle-class milieu.” Despite this, she
developed a lasting relationship with professors and historians Howard Zinn and Staughton
Lynd. With the help of Lynd, Walker transferred to the elite (then) women’s college Sarah
Lawrence in 1964, from which she graduated in 1966.
In 1967 Walker married civil rights attorney Melvyn (Mel) Rosenman Leventhal,
whom she met while working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
in Jackson, Mississippi. Leventhal also worked with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Their
union produced a daughter, Rebecca Grant Leventhal (born 1969), and was tested by
bigotry. Walker and Leventhal remained strong in the midst of the tensions surrounding
interracial couples, and the general distrust of white people in the Civil Rights Movement.
Together, they lived in Jackson for several years before moving to the Cambridge,
Massachusetts, area; they divorced in 1977. Walker did not return to the South for some
twenty years, when she was honored as a speaker at Spelman College. A feminist author-
activist, Walker claims Langston Hughes as her “literary father” and Zora Neale Hurston as a
model for her work. It was Walker, in fact, who single-handedly resuscitated Hurston’s
memory and legacy as a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Walker’s commitment to
black life and experience in America is clear as both she and her work are rooted in
Southern culture. It is through Walker’s fiction that her passion about the suffering of black
people is evident. Still, Walker is often critiqued by black scholars as having a primarily
feminist perspective which, at times, puts her at odds with racial issues. She was among the
first writers to integrate the predominantly white, feminist publication Ms. magazine, where
she worked as a contributing editor. In addition to her editorial duties, Walker wrote several
poems and essays for Ms. and American Scholar. Walker’s other professional appointments
included writer-in-residence at Jackson State College and lecturer at Wellesley College and
the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Walker’s publications are an impressive body of
essays, poems, and novels.
Her first published work of fiction, “To Hell with Dying” (1967), chronicles the life of
Mr. Sweet and the two children who keep him alive. This story, initially
included in a collection edited by Langston Hughes, The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers,
was published as a children’s book in 1988. Walker’s other works of children’s literature
include Langston Hughes: American Poet (1974), Finding the Green Stone (1991), and Why
War Is Never a Good Idea (2007). Many of her essays address black nationalism and its
connection to the Civil Rights Movement. Walker’s essay “The Civil Rights Movement: What
Good Was It?” won first prize for publication in the fall 1967 issue of American Scholar. In
Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973), Walker’s debut short-story collection,
includes “Her Sweet Jerome” and “Everyday Use,” her most widely anthologized and taught
story. Both offer a veiled critique of the black nationalist movement as a platform for
elevating “cultured” blacks over less-educated ones, and an explicit valorization of Southern
folk through her characters. (See Barbara Christian’s essay “The Contrary Women of Alice
Walker” for a discussion of how the women of these stories challenge existing images of
“obedient and unthinking black women.”) Walker’s first novel, The Third Life of Grange
Copeland (1970), chronicles the lives of a family of sharecroppers. Revolutionary Petunias &
Other Poems (1973), Walker’s second volume of poems, also reflects strong feminist and
black Southern roots. Her novel Meridian (1976), set in the South against the backdrop of
the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, speaks to the paradoxes of African American
identity. In 1979 Walker edited I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . and Then Again When
I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, a collection of writings by
and about Hurston.
In 1982 Walker published The Color Purple, an epistolary novel written in dialect,
chronicling the life (and isolation) of its protagonist, Celie, an impoverished black girl in rural
Georgia in the 1930s. Although initially overlooked, The Color Purple received winning
reviews and widespread acclaim in mainstream America, despite considerable critical
backlash against the novel (and Walker) in the black community. Many charged Walker with
unwittingly presenting a negative portrait of the black family, especially black males, arguing
that she provided no context for the abuse and cruelty exhibited by her characters. Yet, The
Color Purple boldly depicted an authentic Southern folk voice and exposed its “formidable
critique of patriarchy” (Salamishah Tillet, “The Color Precious,” 12 November 2009
<http://www.theroot.com/views/color-precious>). Walker, often queried about her
inspiration for the characters in this novel, has said that they are composites of people from
her childhood, and embody several events purportedly experienced by her family members.
Although The Color Purple is not autobiographical, in the sense that she knew almost no one
exactly like its characters, it could be characterized as a “longing to be intimate with [her]
ancestors,” noting that she “always thought of it as a gift.”
A movie version of The Color Purple was directed by Steven Spielberg in 1985.
Almost twenty years after the film’s release, The Color Purple was adapted for the stage as a
musical, premiering in Atlanta’s Alliance Theater in 2004 and winning the Tony Award. Like
the stage version, the film, too, generated bitter debate about its “Disney-like portrayal of
incest” (Tillet), and the more significant charge that its treatment of black male characters
was racist. On an episode of The Phil Donahue Show, columnist and talk-show host Tony
Brown famously declared it, “the most racist depiction of black men since Birth of a Nation
and the most anti-black family film of the modern film era.” See Walker’s book The Same
River Twice—Honoring the Difficult (1996), where she discusses the experience of
adapting The Color Purple for film and responds to the charge that her novel is an
unfair depiction of black men. Other critics have argued that Spielberg’s adaptation, while
certainly popular, was nothing more than a sentimental rendering of an otherwise serious
text about women’s subjectivity and agency. For instance, Walker writes Shug Avery as a
nomadic blueswoman who defies the prescribed gender roles of her day; however, at the
end of the movie Shug, in her quest for salvation, walks down the aisle and genuflects to her
literal and figurative male father. Shug receives the love and reacceptance she craves and
the audience gets their heartwarming moment as father and daughter are reunited. This
overly romanticized film ending is said undermine the novel’s primary premise.
 The Color Purple was followed by In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983); the
title essay offers a passionate analysis of historical barriers to black women’s creative
expression. The Temple of My Familiar (1989) explores black women’s spirituality, and
Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) tells the story of Tashi, who makes a brief appearance in
The Color Purple. It details (and implicitly protests) the practice of female genital mutilation
among some African peoples. Her more-recent works include The Way Forward Is with a
Broken Heart (2000), Sent by Earth (2001), Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth: New
Poems (2003), A Poem Traveled down My Arm (2003), and Now Is the Time to Open Your
Heart (2004).
In 2007 Alice Walker placed her archive, which includes journals, drafts of some of
her early works of fiction, and correspondence between Walker and her editors, at Emory
University. The author resides in Northern California and continues to support the work of
emerging writers through her publishing company, Wild Trees Press, which she started in
1984. A useful website to consult for information about Alice Walker and her work is
Anniina’s Alice Walker Page <http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/ alicew/>
[accessed 19 March 2010], which includes a healthy selection of full-text interviews and
critical articles, as well as excerpts from primary works. Alice Walker’s Garden,
<http://www.alicewalkersgarden.com/alice_walker_welcom. html> [accessed 19 March
2010], promoted as “The Official Alice Walker Website” and maintained by the Alice Walker
Society, offers similar information, though in smaller helpings. Both websites offer a guide to
secondary sources that should be supplemented by the MLA bibliography.