In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece

by Salamishah Tillet

Overview

Mixing cultural criticism, literary history, biography, and memoir, an exploration of Alice Walker’s critically acclaimed and controversial novel, The Color Purple

Alice Walker made history in 1982 when she became the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Color Purple. Published in the Reagan era amid a severe backlash to civil rights, the Jazz Age novel tells the story of racial and gender inequality through the life of a 14-year-old girl from Georgia who is haunted by domestic and sexual violence.

Prominent academic and activist Salamishah Tillet combines cultural criticism, history, and memoir to explore Walker’s epistolary novel and shows how it has influenced and been informed by the zeitgeist. The Color Purple received both praise and criticism upon publication, and the conversation it sparked around race and gender still continues today. It has been adapted for an Oscar-nominated film and a hit Broadway musical.

Through archival research and interviews with Walker, Oprah Winfrey, and Quincy Jones (among others), Tillet studies Walker’s life and how themes of violence emerged in her earlier work. Reading The Color Purple at age 15 was a groundbreaking experience for Tillet. It continues to resonate with her—as a sexual violence survivor, as a teacher of the novel, and as an accomplished academic.

Provocative and personal, In Search of The Color Purple is a bold work from an important public intellectual, and captures Alice Walker’s seminal role in rethinking sexuality, intersectional feminism, and racial and gender politics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781683356851
Publisher:	ABRAMS
Publication date:	01/12/2021
Series:	Books About Books
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	NOOK Book
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	572,961
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Salamishah Tillet is a scholar, cultural critic, and activist. A professor at Rutgers University–Newark and previously a professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, she is a contributing critic-at-large for the New York Times. With her sister, she cofounded A Long Walk Home, a Chicago-based national nonprofit that uses art to empower young people to end violence against girls and women. She lives in New Jersey.

Interviews

New Jersey

Editorial Reviews

01/11/2021

Tillet (Sites of Slavery), New York Times critic-at-large, surveys nearly 40 years of cultural grappling in this insightful account of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel The Color Purple. The novel became the first work by a Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Tillet recounts the novel’s history, covering the controversy it stirred up when published, notably for its “use of a black dialect and its celebration of lesbianism.” Walker later came under fire, as well, for allowing the movie adaptation to be put in white hands. (Steven Spielberg directed it.) In addition to the history, Tillet mixes in her own experiences: “The novel’s main black women characters—Celie, Shug, and Sofia—have endured and emerged as guides that have imprinted themselves on me to help me heal,” she writes of returning to the novel after being sexually assaulted, struggling with an eating disorder, and contemplating suicide. Along the way, Tillet interviews Oprah Winfrey, who made her big-screen debut in the adaptation, and theater producer Scott Sanders, who persuaded Waters “that he, as a white, gay man from the Gulf Coast of Florida, was the right person to produce The Color Purple on Broadway.” Tillet’s passionate insights successfully imbue a classic novel with modern relevance. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

...a journey of uncovering and rediscovering how this beautiful tale was conceived, birthed, and has thrived for nearly four decades.

Elle

We need reminders of the stories that have brought us over, the hymns and spirituals and freedom songs our people sang. The Color Purple is such a hymn. Alice Walker is its composer. And Salamishah Tillet, our conductor, lines this hymn for us, beautifully, so that we might all show up, text in hand, and sing its chorus, in tribute to the genius, care, and love of Alice Walker.

author of Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower - Brittney Cooper

“Tillet delves into the backstory of the novel, explores why Walker’s book continues to resonate, and explains how the literary work became a cultural phenomenon, all while masterfully weaving together personal, cultural, and historical conversations about the text…”

Garden & Gun

This book is a stunning act of devotion, a literary and personal excavation of one of the great novels of American literature, The Color Purple. Salamishah Tillet deepens and refreshes our understanding of the novel, movie, and Broadway play, reminds us of the fraught history of the novel’s publication, shows us how it has moved and transformed generations, and reveals how the controversial issues of sex, race, and gender are still as relevant and controversial today as they were then. Salamishah has allowed this extraordinary work of fiction to guide and heal her life, and her book does the same for us.

author of The Vagina Monologues and The Apology - Eve Ensler

Scholar and activist Salamishah Tillet has written the essential companion to Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple, exploring its controversies, triumphs, legacies and lessons.

Ms. Magazine

…Salamishah Tillet continues the decades-long tradition of Black women unearthing other Black women’s literature…In this continuous act of unearthing, Black women have helped each other breathe easier, see farther, and believe more deeply in the possibility of a world that cherishes their mundane, striking, broken, and full selves.

VICE

Salamishah does what only great writers of literary criticism accomplish—she tells a story about a masterpiece without forgetting the extraordinary woman who crafted it and the legions of women made whole because of her work. A bold and vital tale that rightly treats Alice Walker’s American classic as if it were a living, breathing being demanding our utmost attention and enduring affection.

author of Redefining Realness and Surpassing Certainty - Janet Mock

The Color Purple is my all-time favorite film, hands down. The book is also one of my favorites, but watching the movie has particularly, over time, become a healing balm—almost a spiritual practice. Salamishah Tillet’s book is a beautiful tribute to The Color Purple, and a gift to those of us who are deeply connected to it. For others less tied to the stories of Celie, Shug, and Sofia, it is a history lesson and cautionary tale of what happens when a Black woman attempts to tell her truth publicly; something to be studied and learn from. This will be a necessary companion for all who engage with this story for years to come.

Founder of the Me Too movement - Tarana Burke

One of my most cherished possessions is a copy of The Color Purple, signed by Alice Walker and dated October 22, 1991. In case of fire, I keep it near my family photos to make sure it is not left behind. In Search of The Color Purple delivers extraordinary insight into both the love and the struggle that made Ms. Walker’s exquisitely crafted novel a masterpiece. After reading Salamishah Tillet’s poignant book, neither readers nor writers will forget that it takes courage and audacity to write a novel that tells the reality of women’s lives.

Anita Hill

Tillet comes to a deeper understanding of the novel, Walker, and herself in this revelatory and memorable blend of biography, autobiography, and insightful homage to a literary icon.

Booklist

01/01/2021

In this moving narrative, Tillet (English, Rutgers-Newark; Sites of Slavery) explores how The Color Purple (1982) shaped and continues to shape readers. For the author, this involved traveling to Northern California to speak with Walker about her National Book Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning book and interviewing figures such as Gloria Steinem, who wrote the foreword to this work. Walker tells of basing the character of Celie on her grandmother along with the difficulties of critics misinterpreting the intent of her words. What also emerges is a personal recounting of how Tillet discovered The Color Purple, notably, how she resonated with Celie, as a teenager recovering from sexual assault, while Shug embodied who she wanted to become. This is the strength of the work, as is Tillet reminding readers of the criticism The Color Purple received upon publication as well as ongoing challenges from libraries because of its portrayals of lesbianism and sexual assault. Later, Tillet considers the lasting impact of the 1985 film and 2005 musical based on the book, including Walker's thoughts on both. VERDICT Tillet writes a necessary account of how Walker's centering the lives of Black women has transformed literature. Accessibly written, this book will engage both longtime fans and those new to Walker's writing.—Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal

Library Journal

2020-11-03
A close look at the genesis, impact, and transformation of a beloved novel.

Melding memoir, biography, and cultural criticism, Tillet, a professor, activist, and scholar of African American studies, uses Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, published in 1982, as a mirror for portraying Black women’s experiences in American life over nearly 40 years. In conversations with Tillet, Walker spoke candidly about her early years, literary influences, and the challenges she faced in getting published; after sending an excerpt to Essence magazine, for example, she received a terse reply: “Black people don’t talk like that.” Although the novel was awarded both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, it incited considerable controversy, not only for Walker’s use of Black dialect, but also “its celebration of lesbianism. The harshest criticism,” Tillet discovered, “came from other writers, mainly black men who accused Walker of reproducing racist stereotypes of them as hyperviolent rapists.” It was precisely Walker’s portrayal of violence to which Tillet, twice a victim of sexual assault, responded, and through her research, she found many others—including Oprah Winfrey—“who came across the book at such vulnerable points in their lives that the book became a talisman, with every subsequent return to it a way of marking time and healing wounds.” Tillet draws deftly on published and archival sources as well as interviews, including talks with Oprah, who made her screen debut in Steven Spielberg’s film of the novel, which received 11 Oscar nominations; and Scott Sanders, who brought the novel to Broadway as a musical, where it was nominated for multiple Tony awards. Because of the novel’s groundbreaking themes of sexual assault, same-sex desire, and the linking of sexism, racism, and classism, Walker, Tillet asserts, became “the face of black feminism,” an accolade with which Gloria Steinem, in an appreciative foreword, concurs.

An enriching study for the novel’s many devoted readers.

Kirkus Reviews

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