In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece (Books About Books)

Salamishah Tillet

ISBN 10: 1419735306 / ISBN 13: 9781419735301

Published by Harry N. Abrams January 2021, 2021

About this Item

used hardcover in a dust jacket. jacket is slightly worn about the edges, but with no tears and not price clipped. pages and binding are clean, straight and tight. there are no marks to the text or other serious flaws.

Seller Inventory # 1436922

Bibliographic Details

• Title: In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece (Books About Books)
• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams January 2021
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1419735306
• ISBN 13: 9781419735301
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: VG
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • lit / fiction

About this title

Synopsis

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 1983 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.

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.