When trying to analyze why the content of the novel, The Color Purple, and the way it is, we perceive that there are certain things that influenced the events or things that influenced the writer to write a novel of its nature. We must understand these events and situations that were of the great influence. In most cases this time period would be during the childhood and early midlife and later life of the author.
             Alice Malsenior Walker was born on February 9th, 1944 in Easton, Georgia, the eighth and youngest child of Minnie Grant and Willie Lee Walker. Though her parents were poor sharecroppers and dairy farmers she grew up in a very loving home environment. Her first memories include her great-great-grandmother Nettie, after whom she named a character in her novel The Color Purple.
             In the summer of 1952, at the age of eight, while playing "Indians and Cowboys" with her five brothers and two sisters (Walker was an Indian with a bow and arrow in her hands), her elder brother Bill, accidentally blinded her in her right eye when she shot his BB gun. Walker became very self-conscious of the large white scar tissue that the accident left behind. She became very shy and slowly began to isolate herself from everyone. It was then that she took interest in reading poems and stories, and writing them. Walker once told a reporter "I believe ... that's it was from this period-from my solitary, lonely position, the position of and outcast-that I began to see people and things, really to notice relationships and learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out"(Pollit). At the age of 14, her older brother Bill felt his sister was suffering from severe depression and immediately arranged for the "cataract" to be removed, from a doctor in Boston. Her vision in her right eye never returned, even after the surgery.
             Immediately after the cataract was removed, Walker gained some self conf...