The Same River Twice

In the early 1980s, The Color Purple was a runaway success, having won the Pulitzer Prize and with Steven Spielberg 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 th…