The Color Purple Research Paper
Alice Walker is an American author and poet. She wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
She was the youngest of eight children, born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, in the Deep South of the United States. When she eight, she was wounded in the eye by a shot from a BB gun fired by one of her brothers. This accident blinded her in one eye. As a result, she became more shy, thoughtful and studious; this is when she began to write stories.
Walker studied at Spelman College, a college for black women, in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1961. She then transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in 1963, where she took her degree in 1965.
In 1967, she married Melvyn R. Levanthal; their daughter was born in 1969; they were divorced in 1976. They were illegally married as he was white and society didn’t accept their marriage. From 1967 to 1974, they were involved in the Civil Right Movement in Mississippi, which fought to end segregation. …show more content…
Alice Walker is one of the best known and most admired of the many black women novelists from the South of the United States.
Walker says that she admires Zora Neale Hurston’s “complete, undiminished sense of self” and she aims to replicate Hurston’s ability “to let her characters be themselves”. She admires the way that Hurston was “incapable of being embarrassed by anything black people did, and so was able to write about everything”. Furthermore, she appreciated Jean Toomer’s “feminine sensibility” as it was “unlike most black male
writers”.
Among white writers she admires are the Bronte sisters, Anne (1820 – 49), Charlotte (1816 – 55) and Emily (1818 – 48). Alice Walker comments that these writers are “well aware of their own oppression”. To fulfil themselves as women they use their gifts as creative writers.
Walker read a lot of Russian novels as a child. From Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910) she learned “to drive through” political and social issues to reach the individual spirit, an effort needed to make characters live. She admired the other great Russians of the nineteenth century but was disappointed to find no Russian women novelists.
Among African writers, she praises the Nigerian, Elechi Amadi (b.1934), whose novel written in 1966 may have influenced her prototype of The Color Purple, Roselily.
The Color Purple is an epistolary novel. Samuel Richardson (1689 – 1761) was one of the earliest and greatest writers in this form. The novel in letters appealed to women. Jane Austen (1775 – 1817) also experimented with epistolary novels. Walker may have intended to remind us of Richardson’s novels which deal with the plight of women insulted and abused by men. Like Toomer, Richardson was a man with a strong and delicate sensibility.
She was the youngest of eight children, born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, in the Deep South of the United States. When she eight, she was wounded in the eye by a shot from a BB gun fired by one of her brothers. This accident blinded her in one eye. As a result, she became more shy, thoughtful and studious; this is when she began to write stories.
Walker studied at Spelman College, a college for black women, in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1961. She then transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in 1963, where she took her degree in 1965.
In 1967, she married Melvyn R. Levanthal; their daughter was born in 1969; they were divorced in 1976. They were illegally married as he was white and society didn’t accept their marriage. From 1967 to 1974, they were involved in the Civil Right Movement in Mississippi, which fought to end segregation. …show more content…
Alice Walker is one of the best known and most admired of the many black women novelists from the South of the United States.
Walker says that she admires Zora Neale Hurston’s “complete, undiminished sense of self” and she aims to replicate Hurston’s ability “to let her characters be themselves”. She admires the way that Hurston was “incapable of being embarrassed by anything black people did, and so was able to write about everything”. Furthermore, she appreciated Jean Toomer’s “feminine sensibility” as it was “unlike most black male
writers”.
Among white writers she admires are the Bronte sisters, Anne (1820 – 49), Charlotte (1816 – 55) and Emily (1818 – 48). Alice Walker comments that these writers are “well aware of their own oppression”. To fulfil themselves as women they use their gifts as creative writers.
Walker read a lot of Russian novels as a child. From Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910) she learned “to drive through” political and social issues to reach the individual spirit, an effort needed to make characters live. She admired the other great Russians of the nineteenth century but was disappointed to find no Russian women novelists.
Among African writers, she praises the Nigerian, Elechi Amadi (b.1934), whose novel written in 1966 may have influenced her prototype of The Color Purple, Roselily.
The Color Purple is an epistolary novel. Samuel Richardson (1689 – 1761) was one of the earliest and greatest writers in this form. The novel in letters appealed to women. Jane Austen (1775 – 1817) also experimented with epistolary novels. Walker may have intended to remind us of Richardson’s novels which deal with the plight of women insulted and abused by men. Like Toomer, Richardson was a man with a strong and delicate sensibility.