Author Guide · Fiction, Poetry & Essays
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Alice Walker was eight when a brother’s BB gun shot left her blind in her right eye, in Eatonton, Georgia, where her parents were sharecroppers; she was the youngest of eight children. She began to read and write seriously after the injury. She marched on Washington in 1963, registered Black voters in Mississippi, and in 1973 found the unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston in Fort Pierce, Florida, and paid for a stone. Her third novel, The Color Purple (1982), won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; she was the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer for fiction. This guide covers her 11 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 11 key books · 1970–2004 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Alice Walker has published seven novels, from The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) to Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004), plus three story collections and many books of poems and essays. Her best known is The Color Purple (1982), which won the Pulitzer Prize and was filmed in 1985 and 2023. Start there. Below are her 11 key books in order, then everything else.
Where to Start with Alice Walker
If you want the book everyone means
→ The Color Purple (1982) — Celie’s letters to God.
If you want the civil rights movement
→ Meridian (1976) — a young activist in the South.
If you want her ideas in her own voice
→ In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983) — the essays that coined “womanist”.
If you want something short
→ In Love and Trouble (1973) — thirteen stories, including “Everyday Use”.
11 Alice Walker Books, in Order
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
Her first novel, finished in 1969. Grange Copeland, an abusive, irresponsible Georgia sharecropper, abandons his family and goes north; his son Brownfield repeats the violence. The book traces a rural Black family caught in generations of cruelty and economic dependence, and Grange’s late attempt at redemption through his granddaughter Ruth.
In Love and Trouble
Thirteen stories about Black women pushing against narrow expectations of their intelligence and virtue. It includes “Everyday Use”, in which two sisters disagree over who should have their family’s quilts, and reprints “To Hell with Dying”, an early story that Langston Hughes had included in an anthology in 1967.
Meridian
Meridian, a young Black woman, comes of age as an activist in the civil rights movement in the South, and stays on working in small towns long after others have moved on. Many of its events closely follow Walker’s own years registering voters in Georgia and Mississippi.
You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down
Her second story collection, more openly political than the first. The stories deal directly with rape and abortion, and with Black women making their own lives and art.
The Color Purple
Told in letters, first to God and then between two sisters. In segregated rural Georgia, Celie survives incest and a forced marriage to a widower she calls Mister, while her sister Nettie ends up as a missionary in Africa. With the blues singer Shug Avery, Celie learns to value herself. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award in 1983 and was filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1985.
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
Essays and talks from the 1960s to the early 1980s, on the civil rights movement, Black women’s creativity, her mother’s garden and her search for Zora Neale Hurston’s grave. The book introduced “womanist”, her word for a Black feminist or feminist of colour, and won the Lillian Smith Book Award.
The Temple of My Familiar
Her fourth novel, published seven years after The Color Purple, and a much larger book. Fanny, Celie’s granddaughter, is one of its main characters, which makes it the first of two novels that continue the world of The Color Purple.
Possessing the Secret of Joy
Tashi, the African wife of Celie’s son Adam, a minor character in The Color Purple, undergoes female genital cutting as a young woman and lives with its physical and psychological damage for the rest of her life. The next year Walker and the filmmaker Pratibha Parmar published Warrior Marks, interviewing survivors of the practice in Africa.
By the Light of My Father’s Smile
Narrated from both sides of the grave. A family of African-American anthropologists goes to Mexico to study a people descended from enslaved Black people and Native Americans; part of the story is told by the father after his death, looking back on his family.
The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart
Her third story collection, published eighteen years after the second. Walker had married the civil rights lawyer Melvyn Leventhal in 1967 and lived with him in Jackson, Mississippi, where they were described as the first legally married interracial couple in the state; that period of her life is a recurring subject in her later writing.
Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart
Her most recent novel. Kate, a woman facing old age, sets out on a journey that is both literal and spiritual, to come to terms with ageing. Walker has said that people “seem to lose their imagination about what women’s lives can be after, say, 55 or 60”.
In What Order to Read Alice Walker
There is no series, but three novels are linked to The Color Purple. The Temple of My Familiar (1989) gives a large role to Celie’s granddaughter Fanny, and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) follows Tashi, who marries Celie’s son Adam. Critics often call the three an informal trilogy. Read The Color Purple first; the other two make sense on their own but gain from knowing who these people are.
Everything else can be read in any order. For the early, Southern Walker, go to The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian and the stories of In Love and Trouble. For her thinking, read In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, which explains much of what the novels are doing. The later novels, By the Light of My Father’s Smile and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, turn towards spirituality and ageing.
A reading path
1. The Color Purple (1982)
2. In Love and Trouble (1973)
3. Meridian (1976)
4. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983)
5. Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992)
Everything Else Alice Walker Published
Beyond the 11 key books: 19 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Poetry
9
9 books · 1968–2018
- 1968Onceher first collection, drawing on her civil rights work and travels in Africa
- 1973Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poemsnarrative poems of her Southern past; Lillian Smith Book Award
- 1979Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morningtributes to Black leaders and writers
- 1984Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautifulher fourth collection
- 1991Her Blue Body Everything We Knowcollected poems, 1965–1990
- 2003Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earthnew poems on spiritual and ecological themes
- 2010Hard Times Require Furious Dancingnew poems
- 2013The World Will Follow Joypoems
- 2018Taking the Arrow Out of the Heartpoems
Essays and nonfiction
7
7 books · 1988–2013
- 1988Living by the Wordselected writings, 1973–1987
- 1993Warrior Markson female genital cutting, with Pratibha Parmar
- 1996The Same River Twiceon the making of the 1985 film, and her illness at the time
- 1997Anything We Love Can Be Savedon her decades of activism
- 2002Sent by Earthwritten after the September 11 attacks
- 2011The Chicken Chroniclesa memoir of the hens she kept
- 2013The Cushion in the Roadessays
Children’s books
2
2 books · 1988–1991
- 1988To Hell with Dyinga picture-book version of her early story
- 1991Finding the Green Stonea picture book
Edited
1
1 book · 1979
- 1979I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…a Zora Neale Hurston reader that helped bring Hurston back into print
The years · 1944–2023
Quick facts about Alice Walker
- Known for
- Fiction, poetry and essays about the lives of Black women in the American South, and the word “womanist”.
- 1944
- Born in Eatonton, Georgia
- 1982
- The Color Purple
- 1983
- Pulitzer Prize; “womanist”
- 2005
- Broadway musical opens
- 2023
- Second film of The Color Purple
- Born
- 9 February 1944, Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children of sharecroppers
- Education
- Spelman College, Atlanta (from 1961); Sarah Lawrence College, BA 1965
- Civil rights
- March on Washington, 1963; voter registration in Georgia and Mississippi; NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Jackson
- Hurston
- Marked Zora Neale Hurston’s grave in 1973; her 1975 Ms. essay revived interest in Hurston
- Prizes
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Award (1983); Lillian Smith Book Award; Guggenheim Fellowship
- Lives
- Northern California since the late 1970s
The red mark is 1982: The Color Purple, the novel that won the Pulitzer Prize and became two films and a musical.
How Alice Walker Writes: Letters, Voices and the South
Walker writes from inside the lives of Black women in the rural South, often women with no one to speak to. The Color Purple is told in Celie’s letters to God, in her own grammar and spelling, and later in letters between Celie and Nettie; the form lets a woman who is silenced at home tell the whole story herself. Her early books, The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Meridian, are set in the Georgia and Mississippi she knew from her childhood and her civil rights work.
Her subject is violence inside families and how people survive it: Grange and Brownfield Copeland passing cruelty from father to son, Celie’s abuse by her stepfather and husband, Tashi’s cutting in Possessing the Secret of Joy. The books rarely end in despair. Healing comes through other women, through work, art and quilting, and through a God who is found in nature rather than in church.
Her essays explain much of the fiction. In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens she coined “womanist” and argued that the creativity of Black women’s mothers and grandmothers lived on in gardens and quilts when other art was closed to them. Her rediscovery of Zora Neale Hurston, whose Their Eyes Were Watching God she championed, shaped her own work, and her later novels turn to spirituality, ancestral memory and ageing.
Watch
Alice Walker on the civil rights movement and The Color Purple
In a long interview for the Kunhardt Film Foundation, Walker talks about her parents, her family’s experience of racism, how she joined the civil rights movement and where The Color Purple came from.
Frequently asked questions about Alice Walker’s books
How many books has Alice Walker written?
More than thirty. The 11 key books on this page are her seven novels, from The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) to Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004), her three story collections and her essay collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983). The bibliography lists nine poetry collections, seven books of essays and nonfiction, two children’s books and the Hurston reader she edited.
What are Alice Walker’s books in order?
The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), In Love and Trouble (1973), Meridian (1976), You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1981), The Color Purple (1982), In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998), The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000) and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004).
Where should I start with Alice Walker?
With The Color Purple. It is her best-known book and the centre of her work; two later novels follow its characters. If you prefer something shorter, start with the stories in In Love and Trouble, which include “Everyday Use”.
What is Alice Walker’s most famous book?
The Color Purple (1982). It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award in 1983, making Walker the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer for fiction. It has been a film twice and a Broadway musical.
Has The Color Purple been made into a film?
Twice. Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film starred Whoopi Goldberg as Celie and Oprah Winfrey as Sofia, and received eleven Oscar nominations. A stage musical opened on Broadway in 2005. Blitz Bazawule’s 2023 film, based on the musical, starred Fantasia Barrino, Taraji P. Henson and Danielle Brooks, who was nominated for an Oscar; Walker was an executive producer.
What does “womanist” mean?
Walker coined the word in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983), defining a womanist as “a Black feminist or feminist of color”. The term was meant to bring together questions of race, class and gender that she felt mainstream feminism left out, and it is now used in theology and women’s studies.
Are The Color Purple, The Temple of My Familiar and Possessing the Secret of Joy connected?
Yes, loosely. The Temple of My Familiar (1989) features Fanny, Celie’s granddaughter, and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) is about Tashi, the African wife of Celie’s son Adam. Each can be read alone, but read The Color Purple first.
What was Alice Walker’s connection to Zora Neale Hurston?
In 1973 Walker found the unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston in Fort Pierce, Florida, and had a stone placed there calling Hurston “A Genius of the South”. Her 1975 Ms. essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” and the Hurston reader she edited in 1979 helped bring Hurston’s books back into print.
Why has Alice Walker been criticised as antisemitic?
Mainly for her support of the British conspiracy theorist David Icke. In December 2018, in the New York Times Book Review’s “By the Book” feature, she named Icke’s And the Truth Shall Set You Free among the books on her nightstand; critics said the book puts Jews at the centre of a world conspiracy. Walker replied, “I do not believe he is anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish”, and said the criticism was an effort to dampen support for Palestinians. A 2017 poem on her blog about the Talmud was also criticised as antisemitic, and in 2022 the Bay Area Book Festival withdrew her invitation over the Icke endorsement.
Is Alice Walker still alive?
Yes. She was born on 9 February 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, and has lived in northern California since the late 1970s. Her most recent novel is Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004); her most recent poetry collection on this page is Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart (2018).
Footnotes
- Alice Walker — Wikipedia
- Alice Walker (b. 1944) — New Georgia Encyclopedia
- Alice Walker — Academy of American Poets
- Alice Walker stands by her endorsement of anti-Semitic book — JTA, 2018
- The Color Purple (2023 film) — Wikipedia
- Alice Walker video — Alice Walker’s Garden (official site)
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all hers.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“My activism—cultural, political, spiritual—is rooted in my love of nature and my delight in human beings.”
— Alice Walker, Anything We Love Can Be Saved (1997)
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