The Color Purple.

WALKER, Alice.

Item Number: 2788

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.

First edition. Octavo, original half cloth. Signed by the author in a contemporary hand. Fine in a fine price-clipped dust jacket.

Her third novel, The Color Purple won Alice Walker the 1983 Pulitzer Price, making her the first African-American woman to win one. "While Walker's first two novels end in the promise of good, The Color Purple ends in happiness, reunion and celebration. Walker has said that she took her great-grandmother's life, which included rape and childbearing at age 11, and gave it a happy ending. Once again she had begun with one of her ancestors' stories, completing and transmuting it through her art" (African American Writers, 351). "Critics have both praised and attacked Walker's use of black folk English to capture [protagonist] Celie's perspective. Walker responded, 'Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us. And, amazingly, it has sustained us more securely than the arms of angels'" (New York Public Library, Books of the Century, 135).