The Color Purple

“Reading The Color Purple was the first time I had seen Southern, Black women’s literature as world literature. In writing us into the world—bravely, unapologetically, and honestly—Alice Walker has given us a gift we will never be able to repay.”
—Tayari Jones

 “The Color Purple was what church should have been, what honest familial reckoning could have been, and it is still the only art object in the world by which all three generations of Black artists in my family judge American art.” 
—Kiese Laymon

 “A novel of permanent importance.”
—Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek

“Indelibly affecting … Alice Walker is a lavishly gifted writer.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“A story of revelation . . . One of the great books of our time.”
—Essence Magazine

  “A work to stand beside literature of any time and place.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Places Walker in the company of Faulkner.”
—The Nation

 “Remarkable expressiveness, color, and poignancy . . . not only a memorable and infinitely touching character but a whole submerged world is vividly called into being.”
—The New York Review of Books

 “Richly evocative . . . a vibrant fugue of devotion and search for love.”
—Los Angeles Herald Examiner

“A national treasure . . . A rare and lovely book.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A saga filled with joy and pain, humor and bitterness, and an array of characters who live, breathe, and illuminate the world.”
—Publishers Weekly

“My go-to comfort novel is The Color Purple, by Alice Walker. Even though it touches on difficult subject matter like child abuse and forced marriage, this story believes that human kindness, courage and love can defeat any challenge. Its big, beautiful happy ending is heartfelt and hard-won. Every single time I read this book, I walk away as a slightly better person than I was when I picked it up.” 
—Tayari Jones, The New York Times

“The miracle of the National Book Awards choices in 1983, which included Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place and Walker’s The Color Purple, meant that books that sounded in me in new and more complete ways were held up as models of great literature. It meant that Walker’s and Naylor’s works could garner much wider publicity and acclaim, and more easily find their way to small, rural libraries around the country.(…)While Naylor provided witness and reason for my people, Walker provided witness and reason for my place.”
—Jesmyn Ward, The Washington Post