Jeanne Fox-Alston and Mel Watkins both found the appeal of The Color Purple in the synthesis of characters and themes found in Walker’s earlier works, that it brings together the best of the author’s literary production in one volume. Prescott presented a similar opinion in a Newsweek review: “ The Color Purple is an American novel of permanent importance, that rare sort of book which (in Norman Mailer’s felicitous phrase) amounts to ‘a diversion in the fields of dread.’” Walker “has succeeded,” as Andrea Ford noted in the Detroit Free Press, “in creating a jewel of a novel.” Peter S. “ The Color Purple … could be the kind of popular and literary event that transforms an intense reputation into a national one,” according to Gloria Steinem of Ms. Upon the release of The Color Purple, critics sensed that Walker had created something special. Henry Award, the National Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute. Walker’s numerous poetry collections include Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems (2019), Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart (2018), Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003), Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems (1991), Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1985), and Once (1968). Her literary reputation was secured with her Pulitzer Prize-winning third novel, The Color Purple (1982), which Steven Spielberg adapted into a popular film. Walker is a feminist and vocal advocate for human rights, and she has earned critical and popular acclaim as a major American novelist and intellectual. The author of numerous books, she “is one of the country’s best-selling writers of literary fiction,” according to Renee Tawa in the Los Angeles Times. She earned a BA from Sarah Lawrence College. Poet, essayist, and novelist Alice Walker was born in 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, to sharecroppers Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker.

The color purple by alice walker