Alice Walker Books In Order
Book links take you to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn money from qualifying purchases.Publication Order of Color Purple Books
The Color Purple | (1982) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Temple of My Familiar | (1989) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Possessing the Secret of Joy | (1992) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
The Third Life of Grange Copeland | (1970) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Meridian | (1976) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Finding the Green Stone | (1991) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
By the Light of My Father's Smile | (1998) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart | (2004) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
Revolutionary Petunias | (1973) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
In Love & Trouble | (1973) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Once | (1976) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning | (1979) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down | (1981) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful | (1985) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Alice Walker Poetry | (1985) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Her Blue Body Everything We Know | (1991) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Everyday Use | (1992) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Giving Birth, Finding Form | (1993) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Complete Stories | (1994) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart | (2000) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth | (2003) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
A Poem Traveled Down My Arm | (2003) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Collected Poems | (2005) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Hard Times Require Furious Dancing | (2010) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The World Will Follow Joy | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Collected Essays, Prose, and Stories | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Picture Books
To Hell with Dying | (1988) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Sweet People Are Everywhere | (2021) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
The Life of Thomas Lodge | (1974) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
In Search of Our Mother's Garden | (1983) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Art Against Apartheid | (1986) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Langston Hughes | (1987) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Living by the Word | (1988) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Warrior Marks | (1993) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Same River Twice | (1996) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Alice Walker Banned | (1996) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Anything We Love Can Be Saved | (1997) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Go Girl! | (1997) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Pema Chödrön and Alice Walker in Conversation | (1999) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Sent by Earth | (2001) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
There Is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me | (2006) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for | (2006) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Why War Is Never a Good Idea | (2007) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Overcoming Speechlessness | (2009) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The World Has Changed | (2010) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Chicken Chronicles | (2011) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Cushion in the Road | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
My Life as My Self | (2015) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Gathering Blossoms Under Fire | (2020) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Contemporary Literature and the Life of Faith Books
Listening for God Reader, Vol. 1 | (1994) | Description / Buy at Amazon | ||
Listening for God, Vol. 2 | (1996) | Description / Buy at Amazon | ||
Listening for God, Vol. 3 | (2000) | Description / Buy at Amazon | ||
Listening For God, Vol. 4 | (2002) | Description / Buy at Amazon | ||
+ Show All Books in this Series |
Publication Order of Anthologies
Alice Walker is a famous and celebrated American author as well as poet, novelist, activist, and essay and story writer.
Born February 9, 1944, in Georgia, Walker has been established as one of the preeminent writers to come out of the United States. Her writing has won her many awards. She would go on to be the first woman of African-American descent to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for The Color Purple, which would win the National Book Award the same year.
Alice Walker is known for having a creative vision that is stationed in a variety of themes, including economic struggles and hardship, racial terror, African American folk wisdom, culture, and life (especially in the rural American South). Her novels and stories tend to explore kinship between women with multidimensional aspects and the power of revolution on a political or social level.
She first began publishing her writing in the sixties during the later years of the movement of the black arts. Her writing joined that of Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison and others in being associated with the surge in women’s literature written by African American women post-seventies.
She is not only a celebrated artist, writer, and more, but Walker has also worked in public life to do what she can to address inequality and injustice as well as poverty as part of her work as a human being, activist, teacher, and more.
Alice Walker is the author of The Color Purple series. The first book in the series has been an international success and a best seller. It was first released to the world in 1982 and has since been perhaps the most-associated work of Walker’s that people would associate with her. The second book was released in 1989 and the third book was released in 1992, turning what was initially a one-book series into a trilogy.
The first book in this series was adapted into a full length feature film by the same name. Several of her short stories were adapted as well. The movie was released in 1985. It starred Whoopi Goldberg as Celie and was directed by Steven Spielberg.
The Color Purple is the debut fiction novel from this author. This classic work of fiction is still relevant today and has sold millions of copies, doing quite well. It is critically. acclaimed and is praised as being one of the great works to be released in literature that readers and writers have been inspired by for years.
The story features the main character of Celie, an African American woman living in the deep South of the United States. It is set between the eventual wars that will come to devastate the country. The story starts out with Celie being young, just a girl that was born into a world that is defined by segregation. Her own world is defined by poverty and it seems unlikely that she will be able to get out of a cycle that has been going on for decades.
Things are not good for Celie at home either since she is in a worse spot than she would want to be, and that is putting it lightly. She is dealing with sexual abuse at the hands of the man that she refers to as her father and goes through rape. She also has two children that were taken away the second that they were born. With this being the situation, it is a desperate and very sad life that she lives indeed.
She does not have that many people to rely on since there is some distance between herself and her sister Nettie. She is very close to Nettie and loves her very much, but she simply is not close enough to rely upon. On top of that, she is now married and her union is very ugly, toxic and unhealthy. It’s like going out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Celie is miserable, trapped in her life, and sees no way of escaping it. But in the midst of a dark and lonely life, she suddenly sees a light at the end of the tunnel when she meets a new woman. Shug Avery is not only a singer, but an empowered woman that sees her own worth. She has a way of making magic happen, and has taken total control of where her destiny is going.
She is inspired by the example that this woman sets and dares to dream that she could be the same way. Celie gradually starts to go on her own personal journey and finds the joy and the power of her spirit. The adventure will free her from the past and in the end give her the release from the pain of all that has happened.
On her way to a new life, Celie will find that she is able to change her life on her own by taking charge and even will reunite with some loved ones. In an inspiring fictional tale from Alice Walker that was adapted into a movie, pick up a copy of this classic and read to the end to catch all of this lyrical novel for yourself!
A few years after the hit debut novel was released, the second novel in the series was published. If you like The Color Purple, be sure to check out The Temple of My Familiar!
With a character cast that is as visionary as it is complex, the present and the past blend together in this tapestry in novel form that is both intricate and beautifully brilliant. This story of people who are displaced and dispossessed, of people who have an ancient history and a future that has not yet arrived.
In the second installment of the Purple series by Alice Walker, readers get to meet the character of Lissie. She is a woman that has possessed many pasts. You will also meet a guitarist named Arveyda, his wife who is going back to her homeland, a history teacher named Suwelo, and more. It also includes Shug and Miss Celie from the first novel.
This is a work that you will have to check out, so pick up a copy and read it for yourself!
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