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The Same River Twice

Alice Walker

The real story behind the making of THE COLOR PURPLE in the author's own words

In the early 1980s, The Color Purple was a runaway success, it had won the Pulitzer Prize and Steven Spielberg was making the book into a film.

Yet behind all the critical success, Alice Walker suffered an extreme backlash as she became the object of attacks both personal and political.
Her detractors claimed that she hated black men, that her work was injurious to black male and female relationships; and that her ideas about equality were harmful to the black community. Such was the ferocity of these attacks that she left her own community north of San Francisco and sought refuge in Mexico.

On a personal level, her mother had suffered a major stroke and now Alice Walker herself fell gravely ill with the extremely debilitating condition, Lyme disease. To add to the trauma, her partner of many years announced he'd been having an affair.

In her heartfelt and extremely personal account of this time, Alice Walker describes the experience of watching the film being made as she weathered the controversy surrounding it and came to terms with the changes in her own life.

  • Classification : Literature & Criticism
  • Pub Date : JAN 1, 2007
  • Imprint : Orion
  • Page Extent : 304
  • Binding : PB
  • ISBN : 9780753819593
  • Price : INR 575
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Alice Walker

ALICE WALKER, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, is a canonical figure in American letters. She is the author of The Color Purple, The Temple of My Familiar, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart and many other works of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Her writings have been translated into more than two dozen languages, and more than fifteen million copies of her books have been sold worldwide. VALERIE BOYD was the author of the critically acclaimed biography Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, winner of the Southern Book Award and the American Library Association's Notable Book Award. She was the founder and director of the MFA Program in Narrative Nonfiction and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault professor of journalism at the University of Georgia. She was editor-at-large at the University of Georgia Press and senior consulting editor for The Bitter Southerner.

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