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​. Almost forty years before the "Me Too" movement, the book received both praise and negative criticism upon publication and for the conversations around race, gender, and sexual violence that it sparked and still continues today. Since then, the powerful and controversial novel has been adapted into an Oscar-nominated film directed by Steven Spielberg and a Broadway musical produced by Oprah Winfrey.

In Search of the Color Purple​ by prominent academic and activist ​Salamishah Tillet​ combines cultural criticism, history, and memoir to explore Walker’s epistolary novel. Tillet examines the groundbreaking novel through archival research, interviews with Alice Walker, Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, and others, and through her own personal experiences with the text. Reading ​The Color Purple​ at age fifteen was a groundbreaking experience for Tillet that continues to resonate—as a sexual violence survivor, as a teacher of the novel, and as an accomplished writer. Provocative and personal, ​In Search of the Color Purple​ is a bold and timely work from an important public intellectual that captures this novel’s seminal role in reimagining trauma, healing, and justice for generations to come.

About the Author

Salamishah Tillet ​is a scholar, cultural critic, and activist. Previously a professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Tillet was also a visiting fellow at Princeton and scholar-in-residence at the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center. She is currently the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark, the faculty director of New Arts Justice at Express Newark, and a contributing critic-at-large at the ​New York Times​. With her sister, Scheherazade Tillet, she founded A Long Walk Home, an art organization that empowers young people to end violence against girls and women.