Kaitlin Belew
Mrs. Clark
Honors English III
22 September 2014
The Color Purple The Color Purple is a great book to read. It shows the struggles that black women in the late 1900s faced. Throughout the book Alice Walker, the author, describes many different difficulties the main character encountered. This novel insights us on how poorly women were treated years ago. The Color Purple provides many details into the lives of African Americans in earlier times. Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944 and was the youngest daughter of eight children to her parents. While playing with her brothers, Walker was shot in the eye with a BB pellet when she was eight years old ("Alice Malsenior Walker"). In 1961 Walker left Eatonton for Spelman College on a state scholarship. During the two years Walker attended Spelman she participated in the civils rights movements which she continued to be active in when she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. After receiving her B.A. degree from Sarah Lawrence in 1965, Walker moved on to marry Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal.
Leventhal and Walker lived in Jackson, Mississippi where their first child, Rebecca Grant, was born in 1969. That same year Walker wrote her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland. Walker wrote six novels which place more emphasis on the inner workings of African American life than on the relationships between blacks and whites. Alice Walker has received many awards such as Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983, and the National Book Award for Fiction in 1983. Walker has taught African American women's studies at many colleges including the following: Wellesley, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, Yale, Brandeis, and the University of California at Berkeley (Whitted). In The Color Purple the main character Celie is abused by her father. When her children are born, they are taken away. Celie’s father soon married her off to Mr.__, who simply uses her to work in the fields, look after his house, and take care of his children. Celie struggles to live in the abusive household when she gets separated from her loving sister Nettie. "They calls me yellow like yellow be my name. They calls me yellow. Like yellow be my name. But if yellow is a name. Why aint black the same? Well, if I say Hey black girl Lord, she try to ruin my game" (Walker 97). Life changes for Celie when Mr.__ brings his old lover to the house for Celie to nurse back to health. While Shrug lives with Celie and Mr.__, Celie and Shrug soon begin to fall in love. During her stay at the house, Shrug helps Celie find the letters from her sister. After awakening the voice of her sister and moving away with Shrug, Celie begins to make a business out of her sewing abilities. Celie and Nettie soon began exchanging information, and through Nettie’s letters Celie learns that her Pa is not her real father. She also learns that she