Alice Walker is one of the most influential and controversial figures in twentieth-century American literature. This collection of essays represents a dispassionate scholarly effort to comprehend the essential elements of her prolific imagination, which celebrates women by chronicling their troubled jourbaney from silence to self-expression and from pain to resistance. The essays fall largely into three main groups, focusing on Walker's most famous and controversial novel,
The Color Purple
, on her poetry, which has for too long met with critical neglect, and on her ecofeminist novel,
The Temple of My Familiar
.