February 18: The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Banned in several school districts mostly for sexual and racial themes, The Color Purple is a novel about Celie, a poor black woman who surmounts rape and abuse to find her true self. Still retains its power today.

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name.

Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, the story focuses on the life of women of color in the southern United States in the 1930s, addressing numerous issues including their exceedingly low position in American social culture.

Celie, the protagonist and narrator, is a poor, barely educated, 14-year-old black girl living in the American South. She writes letters to God because the man she believes to be her father, Alphonso, beats and rapes her. Alphonso has already impregnated Celie once, a pregnancy that resulted in the birth of a girl. Alphonso takes the girl away shortly after her birth. Celie has a second child, a boy, whom Alphonso also abducts. Celie's ailing mother dies after cursing Celie on her deathbed.

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 2000-2009 at number 17 because of the sometimes explicit content, particularly in terms of violence.

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