Del Norte Public Library

Tillet's cultural criticism blends literary history, biography, and memoir in an exploration of Alice Walker's National Book Award-winning novel that examines its influence against a backdrop of the civil rights encroachments of the early 1980s.

In the early eighties, the peaceful, reclusive life of poet and writer Alice Walker was interrupted by the appearance of three extraordinary gifts: a widely praised best-selling novel (The Color Purple), the Pulitzer Prize, and an offer from Steven Spielberg to make her novel into a film that would become a major international event. This last gift, which Walker identifies as "the knock at the door," led her into the labyrinth of a never-before-experienced...