"The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then from the sisters to each other, the novel draws readers into the experiences of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery, and Sofia"--

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple weaves a "glorious and iridescent" tapestry of interrelated lives in this New York Times bestseller (Library Journal).
In The Temple of My Familiar, Celie and Shug from The Color Purple subtly shadow the lives of dozens of characters, all dealing in some way with the legacy of the African experience in America. From recent African immigrants,...

Many years ago, the color purple was available only to a privileged few because the process was very complicated and expensive. Then in 1856, a boy named William Henry Perkin was testing a hypothesis about a cure for malaria and found that his experiment resulted in something else--something vivid and rare for the times: synthetic purple. Perkin, a pioneer of the modern scientific method, made numerous advances possible, including canned food and...

Tillet's cultural criticism blends literary history, biography, and memoir in an exploration of Alice Walker's National Book Award-winning novel that examines its influence against a backdrop of the civil rights encroachments of the early 1980s.