What Do I Read Next?
- Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple, printed in 1982, uses Celie's letters to God to chronicle her rise from a brow-beaten woman, who is forced by her abusive father to marry an abusive husband and is separated from her sister and only friend, Nettie, to a self-confident business woman who learns to love others and herself, largely through her friendship with her husband's lover, Shug Avery.
- Maxine Hong Kingston's 1976 novel, The Woman Warrior, records the struggles of the narrator who must reconcile the values of her Chinese immigrant parents, especially her mother, and her own adopted American values.
- Toni Morrison's novel Song of Solomon, published in 1977, presents the geographical and psychological journey of Milkman Dead from a life of empty affluence to self-knowledge and reunion with community as he rediscovers his family's past.
- Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony, printed in 1977, illustrates cultural conflict faced by Tayo, a young man of Native American and white parentage. As a result, Tayo must become reconnected with his Native American roots. After returning from World War II Tayo finds that he is no longer respected by whites as a soldier and former POW but is imprisoned by prejudice of the white community.
- Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel, Invisible Man, presents the struggle of a nameless narrator who, after experiencing various traumas because of his race, comes to the awareness that being black in a white society makes one invisible, or a nonentity.
- Published in 1969, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first of Maya Angelou's many autobiographies and chronicles her experiences living with her grandmother in rural Stamps, Arkansas, being shuffled between her parents, being raped by her mother's boyfriend, and eventually giving birth as a teenager to her own son.
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