2 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present

in Rabbit Is Rich and dies in Rabbit at Rest, transcends these conflicts to experi-
ence true grace.

William H. Pritchard, Updike: America’s Man of Letters (Boston: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2005).
Comprehensive and sympathetic overview of the author’s life and the work, with
a significant amount of discussion devoted to the Rabbit novels.

Pritchard, “Updike’s Way,” New England Review, 23 (Summer 2000): 55–63.
Defends Updike against the charges leveled by Birkerts and Wallace. A version
of the article appears as the introduction to Pritchard’s Updike: America’s Man of
Letters.

Dilvo I. Ristoff, John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest: Appropriating History (New York:
Peter Lang, 1998).
Continues the analysis of history in the Rabbit novels begun in Updike’s
America.

Ristoff, Updike’s America: The Presence of Contemporary American History in John
Updike’s Rabbit Trilogy (New York: Peter Lang, 1988).
Considers history in the first three novels, arguing that they are the story of
middle America as much as of the Angstrom family.

Sally Robinson, “‘Unyoung, Unpoor, Unblack’: John Updike and the Construction
of Middle American Masculinity,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 44 (Sum-
mer 1998): 331–363.
Focuses on the dramatizations of masculinity in the Rabbit novels, with useful
references to various theories of masculinity.

—Kathryn West

h

Alice Walker, The Color Purple

(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982)

Pulitzer Prize juror Peter Prescott heralded Alice Walker’s The Color Purple as
a work of “permanent importance.” Indeed, it is said to have transformed the
literary landscape in terms of its representation of “authentic folk voice” and was
instrumental in establishing Walker as a canonical figure in American letters. The
Color Purple has sold over five million copies, has been translated into more than
two dozen languages, was awarded the 1983 American Book Award in fiction,
and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, making Alice Walker the first black
woman to win this prestigious award.
Born in Winds Chapel, Eatonton, Georgia, to a sharecropping family in
1944, Alice Malsenior Walker attended Spelman College in Atlanta (founded
in 1881 as a school for recently emancipated black women) until her junior
year. Always unpretentious, Walker also possessed a rebellious spirit and resisted