The Color Purple

Alice Walker's The Color Purple, published in 1982, is an epistolary novel set in rural Georgia in the early twentieth century. Celie is a poor African-American girl who writes letters to God about what happens to her: she is beaten and raped by the man she believes to be her father, Alphonso, and the two children born of it, Olivia and Adam, are taken away from her. When a farmer known as Mister asks to marry her younger sister Nettie, Alphonso offers him Celie instead. Celie is abused by Mister and mistreated by his children from an earlier marriage, and when Nettie runs away and stays with her, Mister eventually drives her off, promising that Celie will never hear from her again.

Nettie travels to Africa as a missionary, and the letters she writes become the second strand of the novel, reaching Celie only long afterwards and setting her own life in rural Georgia beside a very different one on another continent. Among the people who come into Celie's life is the singer Shug Avery, whose presence and affection change what Celie is able to imagine for herself.

The Color Purple took the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983 along with the National Book Award for Fiction. It has been adapted for other media, including feature films in 1985 and 2023, a musical in 2005 and a radio serial broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2008, and it has repeatedly been the subject of attempts to remove it from libraries and schools.