Recommendations
Books Like Meridian by Alice Walker
For readers of the civil rights movement novel
If you loved Meridian — Meridian Hill's solitary civil rights work, the non-linear portrait of what the movement cost its participants, and Walker's refusal to romanticize either Meridian or the movement — these books share the same political seriousness, the same interest in the personal cost of political commitment, and the same engagement with African American history in the South.
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Buy on AmazonThe Color Purple
by Alice Walker
Walker's Pulitzer-winning masterpiece — the essential companion in her fiction; where Meridian is about political commitment and the civil rights movement, The Color Purple is about personal liberation; both are about African American women in the South finding their voices.
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Buy on AmazonBeloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's Nobel and Pulitzer-winning novel — the companion in African American women's literary fiction about what women sacrifice for freedom; Sethe's slavery and Meridian's civil rights work are both about the cost paid for resistance to oppression.
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Buy on AmazonThe Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
by Ernest J. Gaines
Gaines's novel in the form of a 110-year-old Black woman's autobiography — the companion in African American fiction about the long arc of the civil rights movement from slavery to the 1960s; Jane Pittman's Louisiana and Meridian's Georgia are companion Southern portraits.
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Buy on AmazonTheir Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston's masterpiece — the essential predecessor in African American women's fiction; Walker championed Hurston, and Meridian's interior life is in direct conversation with Janie Crawford's quest for selfhood.
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Buy on AmazonThe Third Life of Grange Copeland
by Alice Walker
Walker's debut novel — the companion in her Southern fiction about the structures that trap Black people in Georgia; Grange Copeland's Georgia is the predecessor to Meridian's Georgia, and both novels examine the cost of those structures on the people who live within them.
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Buy on AmazonA Raisin in the Sun
by Lorraine Hansberry
Hansberry's landmark play about a Black Chicago family — the companion in African American literature about the aspirations and frustrations of Black life in mid-20th-century America; both works take the political commitments of ordinary Black Americans seriously.
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Buy on AmazonThe Help
by Kathryn Stockett
Stockett's bestselling novel set in 1960s Mississippi — the companion in popular fiction about the civil rights era; where Meridian is a literary novel written from inside the movement and the Black community, The Help is a more accessible novel written largely from a white perspective.
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Buy on AmazonPossessing the Secret of Joy
by Alice Walker
Walker's companion novel — Tashi's story and Walker's most overtly political work; the companion in her fiction about Black women's political martyrdom and the costs paid by the most committed.
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