Trudier Harris, “On The Color Purple, Stereotypes, and Silence,” Black American
Literature Forum, 4 (1984): 155–161.
Argues that The Color Purple unknowingly contributes to a “cultural narrative of
pathology,” charting objections to the way it has been “canonized.”

bell hooks, “Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple,” in Reading Black,
Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New
York: Meridian, 1990), pp. 454–470.
Argues that by placing the emphasis on Celie’s sexual oppression rather than “the
collective plight” of black people, The Color Purple parodies the tradition of the
slave narrative.

Candice M. Jenkins, “Queering Black Patriarchy: The Salvific Wish and Mascu-
line Possibility in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple,” Modern Fiction Studies,
48, 4 (2002): 969–1000.
Analysis of The Color Purple as a text that engages in a “queering” of patriarchal
power in the black community.

Peter Kerry Powers, “‘Pa Is Not Our Pa’: Sacred History and Political Imagination
in The Color Purple,” South Atlantic Review, 60 (May 1995): 69–92.
Examines Walker’s revision of African American religious traditions.

Linda Selzer, “Race and Domesticity in The Color Purple,” African American
Review, 29 (Spring 1995): 67–82.
Examines the use of domestic, familial relations as a “textual trope” for reading
race and class in a broader context.

—Annette Harris Powell

h

August Wilson, The Piano Lesson

(New York: Dutton, 1990)

About himself August Wilson has said: “I always tell people I’m a struggling
playwright. I’m struggling to get the next play down on paper.” This sense of
commitment and discipline allowed Wilson to become one of the most prolific
playwrights in America. In his cycle of ten plays, each covering a different decade
of the twentieth century, Wilson captures changes in twentieth-century African
American life, depicting both its challenges and triumphs.
Named for his German American father, Wilson was born Frederick August
Kittel on 27 April 1945, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The fourth of six children,
Wilson spent his early years with his family in a two-room apartment behind a
grocery store in a racially mixed neighborhood known as “the Hill.” His father, a
baker, was often absent from home so Wilson’s mother, Daisy Wilson Kittel, sup-
ported the family with earnings from work as a cleaning woman. After his parents
divorced, his mother married David Bedford, who moved the family to a white

August Wilson 7