The Color Purple (book)

The Color Purple is from a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker. In 1983 she won both the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Award for fiction with it. The book was later made into a film under the same title and there was also a musical with the same name made about it.

The story takes place mostly in the rural Georgia and talks about the living conditions of black women in the 1930 's in the South of the United States. The novel is often become the target of censorship and is on theAmerican Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000-2009 at number seventeen because of the sometimes explicit content, particularly because of the violence that occurs in it.

The main character in the story is Cabrera, a 20-year-old poor black woman who tells about her life in her letters from her fourteenth year. On her fourteenth she was abused and raped by her father and they then tried to prevent her sister would undergo the same fate. Then she tells about her life with "Mister", a brutal man who terrorizes her. Eventually she comes to know that her husband all the time, and her sister's letters failed to disclose the anger that she feels gives her the power to discover themselves and to go her own way. Her good friend Shug teaches her what it means to be independent and loving.