Life & Background
Walker was born in Georgia in 1944, the eighth child of sharecroppers, and was blinded in one eye by a brother's BB gun at eight — an injury that left her withdrawn and reading. She won a scholarship to Spelman College, transferred to Sarah Lawrence, and travelled to Africa; she returned pregnant and considered ending her life before deciding on an abortion, a period she later wrote about. She worked in voter registration in Georgia and in welfare rights in Mississippi, where she married a Jewish civil rights lawyer in defiance of state anti-miscegenation law. She taught, edited at Ms. magazine, and in 1975 published the essay that rediscovered Zora Neale Hurston. The Color Purple won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award in 1983, and Spielberg's film of it made her both famous and heavily criticised within Black communities for the portrayal of Black men.
The Color Purple
An epistolary novel told first in letters that Celie, a poor Black girl in rural Georgia, writes to God because she has no one else. Raped by the man she believes is her father and stripped of the two children he takes away, she is married off to a widower she calls only Mr — a man who beats her and who is in love with the blues singer Shug Avery. Celie's beloved sister Nettie escapes and goes to Africa as a missionary, writing letters that Mr hides for decades. Shug arrives, and her friendship, and then love, teaches Celie that she has a body and a self. Sofia, her stepson's wife, is imprisoned for striking a white mayor. When Celie discovers the hidden letters she leaves, starts a business making trousers, and finds her own economic footing. Nettie returns with her children.
The epistolary form does the novel's central work: Celie's letters begin in a constrained, misspelled vernacular and become progressively more fluent as she acquires a self, so that literacy, voice, and freedom are made formally identical. The shift from letters to God to letters to Nettie marks her move from a white-bearded God she cannot address to a human recipient and a pantheistic understanding taught by Shug. Walker's term womanism, from In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, was proposed for a Black feminism attentive to race and class and to the whole community, distinct from a mainstream feminism she considered white by default. The novel's harsh portrait of Black men provoked sustained criticism, notably from Ishmael Reed, and that argument is now taught alongside the book.
Why Walker Matters
The Color Purple made Walker the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it is a foundational text of Black feminist literary study together with her critical essays. Womanism entered theoretical vocabulary and remains widely used. Her recovery of Zora Neale Hurston reshaped the African American canon, and her account of a literary matrilineage in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens is a standard essay on the conditions under which Black women's creativity survived.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- The Third Life of Grange Copeland1970
- Meridian1976
- The Color Purple1982
- In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens1983
- The Temple of My Familiar1989
- Possessing the Secret of Joy1992