The Color Purple is the international best-selling novel by Alice Walker, an African American writer from Eatonton. Published in 1982, Walker's epistolary tale chronicles the startling tragedy and triumph of a poor black woman named Celie in her struggle for self-empowerment, sexual freedom, and spiritual growth in rural Georgia in the early twentieth century. The novel has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. As a film directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Quincy Jones in 1985, The Color Purple was nominated for eleven Academy Awards.