April 18, 1983: Alice Walker Becomes the First Woman of Color to Win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

April 18, 1983: Alice Walker Becomes the First Woman of Color to Win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

April 18, 1983: Alice Walker Becomes the First Woman of Color to Win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

“By infusing the black experience into the Southern novel, she enriches both it and us.”

Facebook
Twitter
Email
Flipboard
Pocket

On this day in 1983 Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Color Purple, reviewed in The Nation by the cultural critic Dinitia Smith the previous year:

I wish Walker had let herself be carried along more by her language, with all its vivid figures of speech, Biblical cadences, distinctive grammar and true-to-life starts and stops. The pithy, direct black folk idiom of The Color Purple is in the end its greatest strength, reminding us that if Walker is sometimes an ideologue, she is also a poet. Despite its occasional preachiness, The Color Purple marks a major advance for Walker’s art. At its best, and at least half the book is superb, it places her in the company of Faulkner, from whom she appears to have learned a great deal: the use of a shifting first-person narrator, for instance, and the presentation of a complex story from a naive point of view, like that of 14-year-old Celie. Walker has not turned her back on the Southern fictional tradition. She has absorbed it and made it her own. By infusing the black experience into the Southern novel, she enriches both it and us.

April 18, 1983

To mark The Nation’s 150th anniversary, every morning this year The Almanac will highlight something that happened that day in history and how The Nation covered it. Get The Almanac every day (or every week) by signing up to the e-mail newsletter.

Can we count on you?

In the coming election, the fate of our democracy and fundamental civil rights are on the ballot. The conservative architects of Project 2025 are scheming to institutionalize Donald Trump’s authoritarian vision across all levels of government if he should win.

We’ve already seen events that fill us with both dread and cautious optimism—throughout it all, The Nation has been a bulwark against misinformation and an advocate for bold, principled perspectives. Our dedicated writers have sat down with Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders for interviews, unpacked the shallow right-wing populist appeals of J.D. Vance, and debated the pathway for a Democratic victory in November.

Stories like these and the one you just read are vital at this critical juncture in our country’s history. Now more than ever, we need clear-eyed and deeply reported independent journalism to make sense of the headlines and sort fact from fiction. Donate today and join our 160-year legacy of speaking truth to power and uplifting the voices of grassroots advocates.

Throughout 2024 and what is likely the defining election of our lifetimes, we need your support to continue publishing the insightful journalism you rely on.

Thank you,
The Editors of The Nation

Ad Policy
x