Roots vs The Color Purple: Which Should You Read?

Roots Alex Haley · 1861 ★★★★☆ 4.4 476 pages · ≈ 8 h 49 m · Demanding

“Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.”

Roots is a novel written by Alex Haley and published in 1976. It portrays the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent and sold into slavery in the United States, and follows his life and…

The Color Purple Alice Walker · 1976 ★★★★☆ 4.3 253 pages · ≈ 4 h 41 m · Moderate

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and…