Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Contrary Women of Alice Walker” for a discussion of how the women of these
stories challenge existing images of “obedient and unthinking black women.”)
Walker’s first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), chronicles the
lives of a family of sharecroppers. Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems (1973),
Walker’s second volume of poems, also reflects strong feminist and black South-
ern roots. Her novel Meridian (1976), set in the South against the backdrop of
the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, speaks to the paradoxes of African
American identity. In 1979 Walker edited I Love Myself When I Am Laughing... and
Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, a
collection of writings by and about Hurston.
In 1982 Walker published The Color Purple, an epistolary novel written in
dialect, chronicling the life (and isolation) of its protagonist, Celie, an impover-
ished black girl in rural Georgia in the 1930s. Although initially overlooked, The
Color Purple received winning reviews and widespread acclaim in mainstream
America, despite considerable critical backlash against the novel (and Walker)
in the black community. Many charged Walker with unwittingly presenting a
negative portrait of the black family, especially black males, arguing that she pro-
vided no context for the abuse and cruelty exhibited by her characters. Yet, The
Color Purple boldly depicted an authentic Southern folk voice and exposed its
“formidable critique of patriarchy” (Salamishah Tillet, “The Color Precious,” 12
November 2009 http://www.theroot.com/views/color-precious). Walker, often
queried about her inspiration for the characters in this novel, has said that they are
composites of people from her childhood, and embody several events purportedly
experienced by her family members. Although The Color Purple is not autobio-
graphical, in the sense that she knew almost no one exactly like its characters, it
could be characterized as a “longing to be intimate with [her] ancestors,” noting
that she “always thought of it as a gift.”
A movie version of The Color Purple was directed by Steven Spielberg in
- Almost twenty years after the film’s release, The Color Purple was adapted
for the stage as a musical, premiering in Atlanta’s Alliance Theater in 2004 and
winning the Tony Award. Like the stage version, the film, too, generated bitter
debate about its “Disney-like portrayal of incest” (Tillet), and the more signifi-
cant charge that its treatment of black male characters was racist. On an episode
of The Phil Donahue Show, columnist and talk-show host Tony Brown famously
declared it, “the most racist depiction of black men since Birth of a Nation and the
most anti-black family film of the modern film era.” See Walker’s book The Same
River Twice—Honoring the Diff icult (1996), where she discusses the experience of
adapting The Color Purple for film and responds to the charge that her novel is an
unfair depiction of black men.
Other critics have argued that Spielberg’s adaptation, while certainly popular,
was nothing more than a sentimental rendering of an otherwise serious text about
women’s subjectivity and agency. For instance, Walker writes Shug Avery as a
nomadic blueswoman who defies the prescribed gender roles of her day; however,
at the end of the movie Shug, in her quest for salvation, walks down the aisle
and genuflects to her literal and figurative male father. Shug receives the love and
reacceptance she craves and the audience gets their heartwarming moment as