In letter twelve, Celie, the protagonist, associates the colour purple with royalty and longs for a purple dress. And near the end of the novel, Shug, Celie’s husband’s mistress, says that she believes that it "pisses god off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it." Set in rural Georgia, Alice Walker's The Color Purple is about the life of African-American women in the southern United States in the 1930s who come together by their love for each other, the men who abuse them, and the children they care for.

The novel is made up of letters written by the fourteen-year-old Celie to god, the first few revealing that she has been raped by her father and that she is pregnant for the second time with his child.

Her letters to “Dear God” describe her uncomfortable journey in the male-dominated and racially prejudiced society during the forty years over which the novel unspools. They are written in “broken dialect, resulting in surprising juxtapositions and lyricism. Reading the novel, you don’t merely watch Celie change; you feel it in the beat and rhythm of her words,” notes writer and reviewer, Anna Clark.

The Color Purple earned Walker a Pulitzer Prize in 1983, making her the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer for fiction. It also won the National Book Award and was later adapted into a film and a musical of the same name. The novel has been the frequent target of censors because of explicit violence and sexuality.

Published in 1982.