The first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for The Color Purple-which also won the National Book Award and was adapted into both an award–winning film starring Whoopi Goldberg and a Tony Award–winning Broadway musical-New York Times–bestselling author Alice Walker. Before her success with The Color Purple, Walked penned the two powerful and unforgettable novels collected here. Meridian: This is the story of Meridian Hill, who, as she approaches the end of her teen years, has already married, divorced, and given birth to a son. She's looking for a second chance, and at a small college outside Atlanta, Georgia, in the early 1960s; she becomes involved in the Civil Rights movement. So fully does the cause guide her life that she's willing to sacrifice virtually anything to help transform the conditions of a people whose subjugation she shares. The Third Life of Grange Copeland: In Walker's debut novel, Grange Copeland, a deeply conflicted and struggling tenant farmer in the Deep South of the 1930s, leaves his family and everything he's ever known to find happiness and respect in the cold cities of the North. This misadventure, his "second life," proves a dismal failure that sends him back where he came from to confront his now-grown-up son's disastrous relationships with his own family, including Grange's granddaughter, Ruth Copeland, a child Grange grows to love. Love becomes the substance of his third and final life. He spends it in devotion to Ruth, teaching and protecting her-though the cost of doing so is almost more than he can bear.
