Publication Order of The Color Purple Books
| The Color Purple | 1982 |
| The Temple of My Familiar | 1989 |
| Possessing the Secret of Joy | 1992 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Third Life of Grange Copeland | 1970 |
| Meridian | 1976 |
| By the Light of My Father’s Smile | 1998 |
| Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart | 2004 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women | 1973 |
| You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down | 1981 |
| The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart | 2000 |
Publication Order of Children’s Books
| To Hell with Dying | 1988 |
| Finding the Green Stone | 1991 |
| There Is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me | 2006 |
| Why War Is Never a Good Idea | 2007 |
| Sweet People Are Everywhere | 2021 |
Publication Order of Poetry Collections
| Once | 1968 |
| Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems | 1973 |
| Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning | 1979 |
| Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful | 1985 |
| Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems | 1991 |
| Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth | 2003 |
| A Poem Traveled Down My Arm | 2003 |
| Hard Times Require Furious Dancing | 2010 |
| The World Will Follow Joy | 2013 |
| Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart | 2018 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose | 1983 |
| Living by the Word | 1988 |
| Warrior Marks (With: Pratibha Parmar) | 1993 |
| The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult | 1996 |
| Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism | 1997 |
| Sent by Earth | 2001 |
| We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For | 2006 |
| Overcoming Speechlessness | 2010 |
| The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker | 2010 |
| The Chicken Chronicles | 2011 |
| The Cushion in the Road | 2013 |
| Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker | 2022 |
About Alice Walker
Alice Walker is an American novelist, short story writer and poet, born in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1944. Her novel “The Color Purple” (1982) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award in 1983, making her the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer for fiction. She has also published story collections, essays, children’s books and many volumes of poetry.
Walker was the youngest of eight children of sharecroppers. At eight she was blinded in her right eye by a shot from a brother’s BB gun, and she began reading and writing in the period that followed. She was valedictorian of her segregated high school, went to Spelman College on a scholarship and transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, graduating in 1965. Poems written in her final year there and while studying in East Africa became her first book, “Once” (1968).
After college she worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Jackson, Mississippi, and was writer-in-residence at Jackson State University and Tougaloo College. Her first novel, “The Third Life of Grange Copeland” (1970), is about a sharecropper and his family. “Meridian” (1976) follows civil rights workers in the South and draws on her own experience of the movement. Her 1975 article for “Ms.” magazine helped revive interest in Zora Neale Hurston, whose unmarked grave in Florida she had located and marked in 1973.
“The Color Purple” tells the story of a young Black woman contending with both a racist white society and a patriarchal Black one. Steven Spielberg directed the 1985 film with Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey, a Broadway musical opened in 2005, and a film of the musical followed in 2023. “The Temple of My Familiar” (1989) and “Possessing the Secret of Joy” (1992) bring back characters, or descendants of characters, from the novel.
Her essay collection “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (1983) is subtitled “Womanist Prose”, after “womanism”, the term through which she has advocated for women of colour. Her last novel to date is “Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart” (2004). More recent books include the poetry collection “Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart” (2018), the picture book “Sweet People Are Everywhere” (2021) and “Gathering Blossoms Under Fire” (2022), a selection from her journals edited by Valerie Boyd.
Photo: Virginia DeBolt, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).