These messages sustained me as a teenager growing up in the alienating suburbs of Nashville.īut when it was published, the book ignited outrage, particularly among black men, who felt insulted by it and contended that Walker had reproduced stereotypes of black men as both predators and buffoons. 'The Color Purple' is a celebration of humanity and the transformative possibilities of love. Celie has no one except God, and her letters to God constitute the body of the novel.Ĭelie and Nettie are eventually reunited, and the novel has an undeniably implausible happy ending: Everybody changes, and all is forgiven.īut even at 16, I understood that the novel was an allegory about how the powerless can become powerful. The only person who cares about her is her sister Nettie, who runs away after Celie's husband tries to seduce her. Her stepfather even throws in a cow to sweeten the deal.Ĭelie is alone and loveless. He then gives Celie to a man who needs someone to clean house and raise his children after his first wife dies. She is pregnant at 14 with the first of two of her stepfather's children. Walker tells the story of Celie, an illiterate black woman living in the South in the 1930s. I was 16 and dreaming of becoming a writer myself. I remember the controversy over the book when it came out. This month marks the 30th anniversary of Alice Walker's winning of the Pulitzer Prize for 'The Color Purple,' the first for a novel by a black woman.

Alice walker in the color purple