Alice Walker
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49 free Alice Walker trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Alice Walker grew up the eighth child of Georgia sharecroppers, lost an eye to a brother's BB gun at eight, graduated valedictorian of a segregated high school and became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Along the way she found and marked Zora Neale Hurston's unmarked grave, coined the word womanist, and wrote The Color Purple, the novel Spielberg, Broadway and Blitz Bazawule have all adapted. These 49 questions cover the life, the books and the adaptations. Easy ones ask about Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery, Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey; the middle tier reaches Spelman and Sarah Lawrence, Meridian, the pants business in Memphis, Quincy Jones's score, the eleven winless Oscar nominations, LaChanze and Cynthia Erivo; the hard tier wants Muriel Rukeyser, Jean Toomer's epitaph line, Wild Tree Press, the Anson County shoot, Possessing the Secret of Joy and the ALA challenged-books rank. Everyday Use and The Third Life of Grange Copeland get their turn too. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a book club.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Alice Walker was born in which US state?
Georgia
Georgia. She grew up in the farm town of Eatonton, the eighth and youngest child in her family, and later set The Color Purple in the same countryside.
Q 02How did the eight-year-old Alice Walker lose the sight in her right eye?
A brother's BB gun
A brother's BB gun. It happened in a game of cowboys and Indians; teased about the scar, she withdrew into books and began writing poetry on her own.
Q 03Which radical professor, fired in 1963, mentored the young Alice Walker?
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn. Her college dismissed him for siding with student protesters; Walker left that year too, and Zinn went on to write A People's History of the United States.
Q 04Alice Walker left home in 1961 on a state scholarship for which historically Black college?
Spelman
Spelman. The scholarship came to her as class valedictorian, and as a student there she was invited to the home of Martin Luther King Jr.
Q 05Which one-word title did Alice Walker give her first book, a 1968 collection of poems?
Once
Once. She wrote most of the poems in her final year at college, taking Japanese haiku as one of her models, and the book came out four years later.
Q 06Which poet gave the young Alice Walker an early break by publishing her story "To Hell with Dying" in 1967?
Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes. He picked the tale, in which children's love keeps an old guitar player from dying year after year, for his anthology The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers.
Q 07In Alice Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, what work traps Grange in debt?
Sharecropping
Sharecropping. The harder Grange works the cotton, the more he owes the man who owns the land, so he abandons his family for the North before coming home again.
Q 08Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar made the 1993 film Warrior Marks to campaign against which practice?
Female genital cutting
Female genital cutting. Walker had just written a novel about it, and the pair went on to interview women who had undergone it; Parmar later filmed the portrait Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth.
Q 09In 1973 Alice Walker went looking for the unmarked Florida grave of which writer and put up a headstone?
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston. Walker set the stone, reading "A Genius of the South", on the spot she judged to be the grave, and her 1975 essay about the search helped revive interest in Hurston's books.
Q 10Alice Walker worked as an editor at which magazine in the 1970s?
Ms.
Ms. She was a contributing editor there, and used its pages to win new readers for Black women writers who had fallen out of print.
Q 11Alice Walker coined which term, meaning "a Black feminist or feminist of color"?
Womanist
Womanist. She first used the word in a short story and set out a full definition in a 1983 book of essays, offering it as a wider alternative to a feminism that overlooked women of colour.
Q 12Which 1983 essay collection by Alice Walker sets out her own term for Black feminism?
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. Walker looks for her creative inheritance in her mother's line, and the book gathers her account of hunting for a forgotten novelist's grave.
Q 13Alice Walker's 1976 novel Meridian centres on a young woman involved in which cause?
Civil rights
Q 21What is Mister's first name, which Celie eventually begins using, in The Color Purple?
Albert
Albert. Celie uses the name only after he has changed his ways, and when he proposes that they marry again "in the spirit as well as in the flesh", she turns him down.
Q 22In three decades from 1990, The Color Purple made the American Library Association's 100 books most often what?
Challenged
Challenged. Schools and libraries have repeatedly been asked to take it off shelves and reading lists over its explicit content; it stood 17th on the list for the 1990s and again for the 2000s.
Q 23Which 1992 Alice Walker novel follows Tashi from The Color Purple?
Possessing the Secret of Joy
Civil rights. Walker knew the ground: she had registered Black voters in the South herself, and the novel's events closely follow her own years in the movement.
Q 14The Color Purple is written in which literary form?
Letters
Letters. Celie addresses hers to God because she has nobody else to tell, and later writes to the sister whose replies her husband has been hiding for years.
Q 15Besides the Pulitzer, which major US prize did The Color Purple win in 1983?
National Book Award
Both awards came the year after publication.
Q 16In The Color Purple, what does Harpo open after his wife Sofia walks out on him?
A juke joint
A juke joint. When Sofia comes back for a visit she gets into a fight there with Squeak, the girlfriend Harpo has taken up with since she left.
Q 17In The Color Purple, what is the name of Celie's younger sister?
Nettie
Nettie. She escapes to work with a missionary couple overseas, and for years Celie believes her dead because Mister keeps back everything she sends home.
Q 18In The Color Purple, how does Shug Avery, Mister's mistress, make her living?
As a singer
As a singer. She arrives at Mister's home ill, but it is his wife Celie who nurses her back to health, and the two women become lovers.
Q 19In The Color Purple, Sofia is jailed after hitting whom?
The mayor
The mayor. He slaps her for answering "Hell no" when his wife asks her to be their maid, and after years in prison she is let out to do exactly that job.
Q 20What business does Celie start after leaving Mister in The Color Purple?
Making pants
Making pants. What starts in Memphis as a hobby, sewing made-to-measure trousers, grows into her own company and her first real independence.
Possessing the Secret of Joy. Tashi, from Walker's invented Olinka people, is now living in America, where the novel follows her through years of trauma and psychiatric treatment.
Q 24Who directed the 1985 film of The Color Purple?
Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg. Walker was wary of him at first, then stayed on the production as a consultant, though her own screenplay was set aside for one by Menno Meyjes.
Q 25Who played Celie in the 1985 film of The Color Purple?
Whoopi Goldberg
Whoopi Goldberg. Then a stand-up performer with almost no film experience, she had written to Alice Walker asking to be considered if the book was ever filmed.
Q 26Who both co-produced the 1985 film of The Color Purple and composed its score?
Quincy Jones
Quincy Jones. In his first film as a producer he personally picked its director, despite doubts over whether his choice could tell a Black woman's story.
Q 27Which talk-show host first appeared on screen as Sofia in The Color Purple in 1985?
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey. The part won her an Oscar nomination, and she stayed with the story for decades, producing both the Broadway musical and the 2023 film.
Q 28Which film beat 1985's The Color Purple to Best Picture?
Out of Africa
Out of Africa. It won seven Oscars, while The Color Purple's eleven nominations, which had controversially left out its own director, brought no wins, a shut-out that tied a record.
Q 29Alice Walker wrote The Color Purple after moving west in the late 1970s to which state?
California
California. She settled in a small town in the north of the state while she searched for the right voice for the novel, and she made the region her home.
Q 30Who played Mister in the 1985 film of The Color Purple?
Danny Glover
Danny Glover. His violent husband was at the centre of the row that met the film, with some critics calling its picture of Black men unjustly harsh.