Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple, printed in 1982, uses Celie's letters to God to chronicle her rise from a browbeaten woman, who is forced by her abusive father to marry an abusive husband and is separated from her sister and only friend, Nettie, to a self-confident business woman who learns to love others and herself, largely through her friendship with her husband's lover, Shug Avery.

Maxine Hong Kingston's 1976 novel, The Woman Warrior, records the struggles of the narrator who must reconcile the values of her Chinese immigrant parents, especially her mother, and her own adopted American values. Published in 1977, Toni Morrison's novel Song of Solomon presents the geographical and psychological journey of Milkman Dead from a life of empty affluence to self-knowledge and reunion with community as he rediscovers his family's past.

Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony, printed...