A black America novelist, poet, and short-story writer, best known as the author of The Color Purple (1982), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983. It tells the harrowing story of Celie, a young black woman in the segregated Deep South, raped by the man she believes to be her father and then forced to marry an older man she despises. Told through letters from Celie to God, and to and from her missionary sister Nettie, this story, like much of Walker's work, celebrates the strength of women engaged in struggles against the twin oppressions of sexism and racism. Walker has published collections of poetry, volumes of short stories, and a collection of "womanist prose", In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983). More recently she has published the novels Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), a harsh examination of female circumcision, and By the Light of My Father's Smile (1998); a memoir, The Same River Twice (1996); and Collected Poems (2005). (from The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
A black America novelist, poet, and short-story writer, best known as the author of The Color Purple (1982), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983. It tells the harrowing story of Celie, a young black woman in the segregated Deep South, raped by the man she believes to be her father and then forced to marry an older man she despises. Told through letters from Celie to God, and to and from her missionary sister Nettie, this story, like much of Walker's work, celebrates the strength of women engaged in struggles against the twin oppressions of sexism and racism. Walker has published collections of poetry, volumes of short stories, and a collection of "womanist prose", In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983). More recently she has published the novels Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), a harsh examination of female circumcision, and By the Light of My Father's Smile (1998); a memoir, The Same River Twice (1996); and Collected Poems (2005). (from The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
