The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
Summary
Celie is fourteen, poor, Black and in rural Georgia, and the man she believes is her father has told her not to tell anybody but God what he has done to her. So she writes to God. Two babies are taken from her at birth. She is married off to a widower she only ever calls Mister, to raise his children and work his fields and be hit when he feels like it.
Two people save her. Her sister Nettie escapes and becomes a missionary in West Africa, writing letters home for thirty years that Mister hides in a trunk. And Shug Avery, the blues singer Mister has loved all his life, arrives sick, is nursed by Celie, and turns out to be the first person ever to tell her that her body is her own and that she is worth looking at.
Alongside them is Sofia, who informs her husband she will not be beaten, and whose refusal to say yes to the mayor's wife costs her twelve years.
Mister is the hardest thing Walker does. He is the villain for two hundred pages, and then he is an old man on a porch sewing, and the novel asks whether that is enough, without insisting on an answer.
It is written entirely in letters, in Celie's own English, in bursts of a page or two, which makes a hard book unexpectedly easy to keep reading. The African chapters in Nettie's more formal voice are the section readers most often find slow.
The first third is genuinely brutal and contains rape, incest, beatings and a child taken. What is less often said is that the book ends in something close to joy, earned across three hundred pages rather than handed over. Best for readers who want a novel about a life reclaimed very late, in a voice nobody else has.
Historical Context & Significance
The Color Purple won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award, and Alice Walker became the first Black woman to receive the fiction Pulitzer.
Steven Spielberg filmed it in 1985 with Whoopi Goldberg in her first film role, Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey. It received eleven Academy Award nominations and won nothing, one of the largest shutouts in the ceremony's history, drew criticism at the time from Black commentators who argued that its portrayal of Black men relied on stereotype. A Broadway musical followed in 2005 and a film of that musical in 2023.
Walker coined the term womanist, in her essay collection In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. The novel has been among the most frequently banned books in American schools for four decades.