Women, God, and The Color Purple

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Ever since the beginning of America, the way African-Americans have lived and been treated has been quite different than how white Anglo-Saxon Americans live. While racial equality is more visible now than ever, just decades ago people lived very different lives just because of the color of their skin. In Alice Walker’s prize-winning novel, The Color Purple, she presents to the world the lives and difficulties faced by many African-American women, even to this day. She addresses gender, spirituality, and even sexuality in a way that leaves an impact on readers, even after they have set the book down.
Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944 as the eighth and final child of Willie Lee and Millie Tallulah Grant Walker, tenant farmers in Eatonton, Georgia. When she was eight year old, she was blinded in her right eye after her brother accidentally shot it with a BB gun. This was a pivotal moment in her life as until then she had always been outgoing, but her injury made her very self-conscious. She soon became a lonely outcast, but she now saw the world differently. She became an observer, paying closer attention to people and the dynamics of their relationships. (Lister 3)
As an adult, Walker spent time at Spelman College, an all-women’s college in Atlanta, Georgia, and eventually transferred to and graduated from Sarah Lawrence. During this time she both travels to Africa for a summer and undergoes an abortion, two events that inspired her to write poetry (Bloom Modern 229). After she was finished with school, she became very involved in the Civil Rights movement, working for voter registration drives and Head Start programs (Lister 3). A few years later, in 1968, her first book of poetry, entitled Once, was published. She b...

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Works Cited
Bloom, Harold. Bloom’s Major Novelists: Alice Walker. Philadelphis, Ps: Chelsea House Publishers, 2000. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 8 Apr. 2014.
Bloom, Harold. Modern Critical Views: Alice Walker. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Print.
Lister, Rachel. Alice Walker: The Color Purple. Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.
Proudfit, Charles L. “Celie’s Search For Identity: A Psychoanalytic Developmental Reading Of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.” Contemporary Literature 32.1 (1991): 12. Publisher Provided Full Text Searching File. Web. 7 Apr. 2014.
Robinson, Cynthia Cole. “The Evolution Of Alice Walker.” Women’s Studies 38.3 (2009): 293. Publisher Provided Full Text Searching File. Web. 8 Apr. 2014.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. First Harvest ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. Print.

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