“Reading The Color Purple was the first time I had seen Southern, Black women’s literature as world literature. In writing us into the world—bravely, unapologetically, and honestly—Alice Walker has given us a gift we will never be able to repay.” —Tayari Jones
“The Color Purple was what church should have been, what honest familial reckoning could have been, and it is still the only art object in the world by which all three generations of Black artists in my family judge American art.” —Kiese Laymon
“The miracle of the National Book Awards choices in 1983, which included Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place and Walker’s The Color Purple, meant that books that sounded in me in new and more complete ways were held up as models of great literature. It meant that Walker’s and Naylor’s works could garner much wider publicity and acclaim, and more easily find their way to small, rural libraries around the country.(…)While Naylor provided witness and reason for my people, Walker provided witness and reason for my place.” —Jesmyn Ward, The Washington Post
“Indelibly affecting . . . Alice Walker is a lavishly gifted writer.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Places [Walker] in the company of Faulkner.” —The Nation
“Remarkable expressiveness, color, and poignancy . . . Not only a memorable and infinitely touching character but a whole submerged world is vividly called into being.” —The New York Review of Books
“A saga filled with joy and pain, humor and bitterness, and an array of characters who live, breathe, and illuminate the world.” —Publishers Weekly
