This collection of fiction is heavily autobiographical, and includes a story about the activities of Walker and her first husband, a Jewish lawyer, in the civil rights movement, and a remembrance of a great-aunt who was a former slave.

Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the co...

The story of an American family--would-be writer Susannah, her sister Magdalena, and her parents--who take up life with an endangered mixed race of Black Indians in the Mexican Sierras, explores how a woman's denied sexuality leads to...

Kate Talkingtree, an African-American feminist writer who has made it big, decides to join an all-female rafting trip down the Colorado. There she has an epiphany, and when she returns home she eschews sex with her lover, eventually s...