The Color Purple

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2010 at number seventeen because of the sometimes explicit content, particularly in terms of violence. In 2003, the book was listed on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's "best-loved novels." Plot Celie is a poor 14-year-old African-American girl living in rural Georgia in the early 1900s. She writes letters to God because her father Alphonso beats and rapes her, resulting in two children, Olivia and Adam, that he abducts. A farmer identified as "Mister" asks to marry her younger sister Nettie, and Alphonso gives him Celie instead. Mister abuses Celie physically, sexually and verbally, and his prior children mistreat her as well. Nettie runs away and stays with Celie, but Mister makes advances toward her. Celie tells her to seek help from a well-dressed black woman she saw in town. Nettie promises to write but never does, and Celie concludes that she is dead.