Alice Walker Banned

Introduction by Patricia Holt

Throughout her distinguished career, Alice Walker's work has been at the center of controversies around language, censorship, truth and art. Alice Walker Banned explores just what it is that various groups have found so threatening in Walker's work, bringing together the short stories "Roselily" and "Am I Blue?," an excerpt from the novel The Color Purple, as well as testimonies, letters, and essays about attempts to censor Walker's work by the California State Board of Education. The introduction by San Francisco Chronicle Book Review editor Patricia Holt offers insightful and ironic commentary on the efforts of the Traditional Values Coalition to pressure the State Board of Education into withdrawing Walker's stories from a statewide exam, while excerpts from a Board of Education hearing offer views from across the political spectrum on these efforts to censor Walker's work.

…a fascinating, frightening book…

—Mirabella

…an invaluable contribution to the literature of censorship…

—Booklist

…this book will allow a cooler, more informed discussion of an important debate.

—Library Journal

As an introduction to Alice Walker, this small book presents two of Walker's most interesting stories, "Roselily" and "Am I Blue," and the beginning of her prize-winning novel, The Color Purple. Further, the pages of Patricia Holt's introduction and the appendices of letters to the editors and meeting transcripts exemplify ways in which these fictional works have been the center of volatile controversy. They have been the subject of removal from tests (as in the case of the recent literature-based assessment tests in California), from school libraries and from school curricula. These controversies, played out in communities across the United States, cut to the heart of issues of censorship and democratic process.

Library Journal

In response to outrage from Christian conservatives, the California State Board of Education (BOE) removed in 1994 two short stories by Alice Walker from its California Learning Assessment System (CLAS) exam, which was adopted to allow children of all backgrounds a "level playing field." One of the stories, "Roselily," an interior monolog of a poor, Mississippi girl (an unwed mother) as she is being married and taken away to Chicago like chattel, was deemed "anti-religious." The other story, "Am I Blue?," is an allegory of slavery told by a narrator observing the treatment of a horse; the story's ending holds emotional associations of eating animal products with cruelty and was thus marked "anti-meat-eating." Here, in time for Banned Books Week, the two stories are reprinted in full, along with an excerpt from Walker's other much-censored book, The Color Purple. With an introduction by Patricia Holt delineating the controversy and appendixes of newspaper articles, letters, and minutes of the BOE meeting, this book will allow a cooler, more informed discussion of an important debate.Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"

In her highly praised fiction and her wide-ranging nonfiction, Pulitzer-winning author Alice Walker often concerns herself with various types of violence toward women. Her stories are often painful to read, but she uncovers insights about race, gender and human resilience along the way.