The Color Purple

The Color Purple is an epistolary novel—a novel told in letter form—in which Alice Walker traces the gradual liberation of Celie, a poor, Black woman who must overcome abuse and separation from her beloved sister Nettie. Set in the South and an unnamed African country during the 1930 to 1940s, the novel is a study in the ways in which Black women use their faith, relationships, and creativity to survive racial and sexual oppression. Several of Walker’s later novels, The Temple of My Familiar (1989) and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), contain characters from The Color Purple.

The novel was critically acclaimed, garnering Walker the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Award for fiction. It was adapted into a film directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey in 1985. It was also developed into a musical in 2005, which was revived on Broadway in 2017, earning the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical. This musical was turned into a film in 2023, which Spielberg and Winfrey returned to produce.