Alice Walker won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for "The Color Purple," a novel which gained even further recognition -- as well as fierce criticism -- when Steven Spielberg turned it into a movie. In her latest book, "The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult" Walker grapples with some of the issues raised in the making of the film. The following are excerpts of a conversation held between Walker and her former professor Howard Zinn (of Spelman College in Georgia) as part of San Francisco's City Arts and Lectures series.

Given the impact of your novel "The Color Purple," it was a real risk to do the film, and so hard to make people happy with it. Did you have a hard time being satisfied with it?

Of course I did, but I had to accept that it was different. There are so many ways of thinking about why you decide to collectively do something rather than stay in your solitude. For me, I was always thinking about growing up in Edenton, N.C. It was totally segregated. In the theaters, white people would be down below, and we would be up in the gallery, where the broken seats were. I had never seen a film that had black people in real character roles, you know, where they were actually real people. They were only servants and maids and stereotypes.

I never thought that one of my books would become a film -- never. When Steven Spielberg appeared, there was a part of me that saw it as a magical thing. It was a great risk, of course, because I don't know that Steven has been South yet. But there was something about this person appearing, open-hearted, very intense and very loving toward this book.

---

Next page:The strangeness of "Waiting to Exhale"