Reading Order
Meridian Reading Order
Meridian (1976) by Alice Walker is her second novel and her most explicitly political — a novel about the American civil rights movement, set in Georgia and Mississippi in the 1960s and 1970s, following a young Black woman named Meridian Hill who becomes a civil rights worker and who is still, a decade after the movement's peak, going into Southern towns to help Black people register to vote. The novel is non-linear, moving between the past and the present, between Meridian's Georgia childhood, her civil rights work, her time at a Saxon College (based on Spelman, Walker's own college), and her present life as a solitary, sometimes paralyzed activist who has given up everything — her son, her ambition, any conventional life — for her commitment to the movement. Meridian is Walker's attempt to understand what it cost people to be in the civil rights movement — the personal cost, the spiritual cost, the cost in terms of the conventional life that the movement's most committed participants sacrificed. Meridian is not a hero in any triumphalist sense: she is damaged, often sick, sometimes unable to move, and the novel does not romanticize her or the movement. The novel also includes Truman Held, a civil rights worker who marries Lynne, a white Jewish woman from the North, and the novel's portrait of that marriage and its tensions — racial, gendered, generational — is one of its most charged elements. Meridian is widely regarded as one of the best American novels about the civil rights movement.
Where to start
Meridian — any Harcourt paperback. The most overtly political of Walker's novels and an excellent starting point for readers interested in the civil rights movement. The Color Purple (1982) is the companion in her fiction and her most celebrated work.
Complete Meridian Book List
- 1Buy
Meridian
Alice Walker·1976·The novel — Meridian Hill's civil rights work in Georgia and Mississippi; the non-linear portrait of what the movement cost its participants; the most explicitly political of Walker's novels and one of the best American novels about the civil rights movement. - 2Buy
The Color Purple
Alice Walker·1982·Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the essential companion in her fiction; Celie's letters are the companion in Walker's portrait of Black women's lives in the South; the novel that made Walker famous and that speaks directly to the tradition Meridian begins. - 3Buy
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
Alice Walker·1970·Walker's debut novel — the companion in her fiction about African American families in the rural South; Grange Copeland's three lives are the predecessor in her examination of the structures that trap Black people in the South. - 4Buy
Possessing the Secret of Joy
Alice Walker·1992·Walker's later novel — the companion in her fiction about violence against African women; where Meridian is about political violence and the civil rights movement, Possessing the Secret of Joy is about the violence of female genital mutilation. - 5Buy
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
Ernest J. Gaines·1971·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 portraits of the South across a century. - 6Buy
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston·1937·Hurston's masterpiece — the essential predecessor in African American women's fiction; Walker was Hurston's great champion when Hurston was largely forgotten, and Meridian's portrait of Meridian's interior life is in direct conversation with Janie Crawford's quest in Their Eyes Were Watching God. - 7Buy
The Secret Life of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd·2002·Kidd's novel set in 1964 South Carolina — the companion in popular fiction about the civil rights era; where Meridian is a literary novel written from inside the movement, The Secret Life of Bees is a more accessible novel written from its edges. - 8Buy
Beloved
Toni Morrison·1987·Morrison's Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the companion in African American women's literary fiction about the costs paid for freedom; Sethe's slavery and Meridian's civil rights work are both about what women sacrifice to resist the structures that oppress them.
Meridian — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Meridian about?
Meridian follows Meridian Hill, a young Black woman from Georgia who becomes a civil rights worker in the 1960s. The novel is set in the 1960s and 1970s, and its structure is non-linear: it moves between Meridian's childhood in Georgia, her time at Saxon College (based on Spelman), her civil rights work in Mississippi, and her present life a decade after the movement's peak, when she is still going alone into Southern towns to help Black people register to vote. The novel includes Truman Held, a fellow civil rights worker who marries Lynne, a white Jewish woman from the North; the tensions of that interracial marriage run through the novel alongside Meridian's solitary commitment. Walker is asking what it cost the people who were most committed to the civil rights movement: Meridian has given up her son, her education, any conventional life.
Why is Meridian often paralyzed and ill?
Meridian's periodic paralysis and illness — she sometimes cannot move, sometimes loses her hair, sometimes is bedridden — is Walker's representation of the cost of the civil rights commitment. Walker is suggesting that Meridian's body is paying for what she has given up: her son, her conventional life, her comfort, her safety. The illness also connects to a tradition in African American women's fiction of representing the cost of resistance and sacrifice through the body. But the novel does not let Meridian's illness simply be tragedy: she recovers, she goes back to work, and the novel ends with her passing the commitment on to Truman. The illness is not defeat; it is the price of conscience.
What is the role of Truman Held and Lynne in the novel?
Truman Held is a civil rights worker who was once involved with Meridian and who has married Lynne, a white Jewish woman from the North who came south to work for civil rights. The Truman-Lynne marriage and its subsequent dissolution — their daughter Camara is killed by a young Black man; the marriage cannot survive the grief and the racial tensions that the civil rights movement has made acute — is one of the novel's most charged subplots. Walker is examining the specific tensions of interracial relationships forged in the civil rights movement: the white Northern woman who came south out of genuine idealism and the Black man who was formed by the South; the way racial politics invaded their marriage; the way they both failed the other.
How does Meridian relate to The Color Purple?
Meridian (1976) preceded The Color Purple (1982) and is in many ways Walker's more intellectually ambitious novel — more explicitly political, more formally complex, more directly engaged with the civil rights movement and African American intellectual history. The Color Purple is Walker's more emotionally accessible novel and the one that reached a much wider audience, winning the Pulitzer Prize and being adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg. The two novels share Walker's essential concerns — Black women's lives in the South, the structures that oppress them, the possibility of their liberation — but approach those concerns in different registers: Meridian through political history and formal experiment, The Color Purple through Celie's intimate letters.
What should I read after Meridian by Alice Walker?
After Meridian, The Color Purple (1982) is Walker's Pulitzer-winning masterpiece. The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) is her debut novel and companion in her Southern fiction. For American fiction about the civil rights movement, Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Kathryn Stockett's The Help are important companions in different registers. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is the essential predecessor in African American women's fiction.
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