In the 1970s novelist and poet Alice Walker wrote a famous essay that brought Zora Neale Hurston and her classic novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God" back to the attention of the literary world. In 1982, Walker won both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for her novel "The Color Purple". An epistolary novel (a book written in the form of letters), "The Color Purple" tells the story of Celie, a young woman who is sexually abused by her stepfather and then is forced to marry a man who physically abuses her. The novel was later made into a film by Steven Spielberg.