Reading Order
The Color Purple Reading Order
The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning and National Book Award-winning novel — the most celebrated work of African-American feminist fiction and one of the most important American novels of the second half of the twentieth century. Written in epistolary form (letters from Celie to God, then to her sister Nettie, then Nettie's letters back from Africa), the novel follows Celie, a poor Black girl in rural Georgia in the 1930s who has been abused by her stepfather (who fathers two children by her, who are taken from her), married to 'Mister' (Albert Johnson, who beats her and humiliates her), and who gradually, through her friendship with the blues singer Shug Avery and through her sister Nettie's letters from Africa, discovers herself, her sexuality, and her voice. Walker's novel is remarkable for the sustained use of African-American vernacular English — Celie's letters are written in the dialect of a rural Georgia Black woman of limited formal education, and Walker uses this dialect not as a mark of limitation but as a medium for a precisely observed inner life. The novel traces Celie's gradual transformation from a woman who has learned to make herself invisible (her response to abuse is to go somewhere else inside herself) to a woman who can take up space, express desire, assert ownership of herself. This transformation is enabled by Shug Avery — the embodiment of female desire and self-assertion, who becomes Celie's lover and her model for what a woman can be. The Color Purple is also a novel about Africa: Nettie's letters from her missionary work in Liberia provide a transatlantic dimension that connects Celie's Georgia suffering to the history of the African diaspora.
Where to start
The Color Purple — any Harcourt edition. The epistolary form and the dialect can take a few pages to enter; once you are in Celie's voice, the novel is irresistible.
Complete The Color Purple Book List
- 1Buy
The Color Purple
Alice Walker·1982·The novel — Celie's letters to God and Nettie, Shug Avery's friendship and love, and the long journey from invisibility to voice. - 2Buy
Meridian
Alice Walker·1976·Walker's preceding novel — a civil rights activist's psychological journey; the political companion to The Color Purple's personal journey. - 3Buy
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston·1937·Hurston's Harlem Renaissance novel — the predecessor in African-American women's fiction; Janie's self-discovery through voice and desire is the direct forerunner of Celie's journey. - 4Buy
Beloved
Toni Morrison·1987·Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — published five years after The Color Purple; the companion in African-American women's fiction's engagement with slavery and its consequences. - 5Buy
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison·1970·Morrison's debut — a Black girl's desire for blue eyes; the predecessor to both The Color Purple and Beloved in African-American women's fiction's account of Black female selfhood under American racism. - 6Buy
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou·1969·Angelou's memoir — African-American women's autobiography of abuse and self-discovery; the generic companion to The Color Purple (memoir vs. novel) in the same tradition. - 7Buy
Nervous Conditions
Tsitsi Dangarembga·1988·Dangarembga's Zimbabwean feminist novel — the African companion in the tradition of women's fiction about abuse, education, and self-discovery; Celie's journey from an African woman's perspective. - 8Buy
So Long a Letter
Mariama Bâ·1979·Bâ's Senegalese epistolary novel — the formal companion (both are epistolary) and the African feminist parallel; women's suffering under patriarchal culture in post-independence West Africa.
The Color Purple — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Color Purple about?
The Color Purple is told through letters from Celie, a young Black woman in rural Georgia in the early 1930s. Celie has been abused by her stepfather (who has fathered two children by her, taken from her) and married off to Albert ('Mister'), who beats her and treats her as a domestic servant. Her beloved sister Nettie runs away from their stepfather and becomes a missionary in Africa, sending Celie letters that Mister intercepts and hides. Celie's life is transformed by the arrival of Shug Avery — a blues singer, Mister's beloved, a woman of extraordinary vitality and self-possession. Shug and Celie become friends and eventually lovers. Shug helps Celie discover her sexuality, helps her find Nettie's hidden letters, and eventually helps her leave Mister. The novel ends with Celie's return to Georgia and the reunion with Nettie (who returns from Africa with Celie's grown children) as a woman who has found her voice and her independence.
Why is the dialect narration significant?
Walker's decision to write Celie's letters in African-American vernacular English — the dialect of a poor, rural Georgia Black woman of limited formal education — was controversial when the novel was published and remains one of its most distinctive features. The dialect is not a marker of Celie's stupidity or limitation: within its grammatical and phonological conventions, it is precise, subtle, and fully adequate to the range of experience and reflection that Celie needs to express. Walker is making a political and aesthetic claim: that the standard literary English that is considered the only appropriate medium for serious fiction is itself a form of exclusion, and that African-American vernacular has its own beauty, its own precision, its own adequacy to the deepest human experiences. Celie's voice in dialect is the novel's most radical formal gesture.
What is Shug Avery's role and why is she important?
Shug Avery — blues singer, Mister's great love, Celie's friend and lover — is the novel's most fully realized character and its embodiment of what a woman can be if she refuses the roles that society prescribes. Where Celie has learned to make herself invisible in response to abuse, Shug has learned to take up space: she demands attention, expresses desire, earns money, leaves and returns on her own terms. She is also the novel's theory of God: Shug's theology (articulated in conversations with Celie) is pantheist and immanent — God is in everything, including the color purple, including the act of making love. This theology is central to the novel's title and to its redemptive vision: the color purple is God's beauty in the world, accessible to everyone who learns to notice it.
How does the Africa subplot function in the novel?
Nettie's letters from Africa — where she is working as a missionary with the Olinka people in Liberia — provide a transatlantic dimension to The Color Purple that connects Celie's Georgia suffering to the broader history of the African diaspora. The Olinka people's resistance to colonial dispossession (their land is being taken for rubber plantations) parallels Celie's resistance to her own dispossession; the African women's subordination to male authority parallels Celie's own situation. The Africa subplot also allows Walker to complicate the novel's racial politics: the African people the missionaries work with are not the romanticized Africa of Pan-African fantasy but a specific, complex society with its own patriarchal structures. The connection between African-American and African women's suffering is not one of simple solidarity but of specific, historical parallels.
What should I read after The Color Purple?
After The Color Purple, Alice Walker's Meridian (1976), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) extend her literary project. For the African-American women's literary tradition, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Toni Morrison's Beloved are the most important companions. For the epistolary tradition, Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter (1979) is the African feminist parallel. Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) is the memoir companion. For scholarly work on Walker, Maria Lauret's Alice Walker (2000) is a good introduction.
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