The Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Color Purple, is a book criticized for its immoral issues, such as incest, rape, and physical abuse. The amazingly detailed text comes from a very active feminist author, Alice Walker, who used many of her own stories, as well as examples from history, in her writings. Alice Walker was inclined to write The Color Purple due to the racism, sexual abuse, and segregation of opposite genders in the mid 20th century. As stated in Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction, The Color Purple takes place in the early 1900's, and symbolizes the ruthless social, emotional, and economic hardships facing African American women in the South (875). The protagonist of the story is Celie, a woman whom thirty years of her life are recorded in letters written to God, and then to her sister, who is a missionary in Africa. Celie starts off as a...