What is The Color Purple book about and why should I read it?”
At the heart of The Color Purple, the musical based on novel by Alice Walker, is a story about learning how to love yourself. The touring show, which will be in Jacksonville through Nov. 22 as part of The Artist Series at the Times Union Center, is simply fantastic. The Color Purple opened on Broadway in December 2005. Produced by Scott Sanders, Quincy Jones and Oprah Winfrey, the show was nominated for numerous Tony awards that year and began touring in 2007. The story centers around Celie, who at the opening of the play is 14 years old and pregnant. The only person who shows any love to Celie is her sister, Nettie. Celie is forced into marrying Mister, who treats her like dirt and works her to the bone. Mister does not allow Celie to correspond with her sister and Celie spends the years doing right by everyone, including Mister, his children and the folks in town, until Shug Avery comes back to town. Shug, Mister’s lover, warms to Celie and they strike up a unique friendship that all
The Color Purple is an acclaimed 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker. It received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name. Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, the story focuses on female black life during the 1930s in the Southern United States, addressing the numerous issues including their exceedingly low position in American social culture. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-1999 at number seventeen because of the sometimes explicit content, particularly in terms of violence. Themes Relationships A dominant theme is the power of women coming together. The women see men as careless and insignificant to their lives. Women in the novel are degraded by men and generally used for male pleasure. The female relationships are friendly and sisterly and also sexual. Cel
