The Color Purple
1976
- fiction & literature
- blacks
- social life and customs
- songs and music
- lesbian fiction
- epistolary fiction
- fiction
- african american women
- sisters
- adult child sexual abuse victims
The story
The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particularly in terms of violence. In 2003, the book was listed on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's "best-loved novels." --- Also contained in: - [The Third Life of Grange Copeland / Meridian / The Color Purple](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL18025207W/The_Third_Life_of_Grange_Copeland_Meridian_The_Color_Purple)
What it’s like
Written as letters, so the voice carries everything: a loose, phonetic Southern vernacular that reads like someone talking low on a porch. The world is dusty roads, cotton fields, hot kitchens and sun-faded cloth, with quilts stitched from scraps, Sunday church, and juke-joint blues giving it a warm, earthy palette. Early chapters carry a cold, heavy dread that gradually loosens. The pace is unhurried and intimate, opening with a girl's private prayers and widening over years into letters between sisters and a glimpse of distant Africa. The emotional register moves from numbness and grief toward tender, hard-won self-possession: a silenced woman slowly finding her voice and her own worth, with humor and sisterhood threaded through. Intensity is significant. Child sexual abuse and rape are described directly, domestic beatings recur, racial violence sits in the background, and adult sexuality between women is frank, though not gratuitous. Violence is brief but lands hard. It suits readers who want a deeply human, voice-driven novel about resilience, faith and sisterhood, and who are ready for heavy material.
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