SOURCE: "Alice Walker: The Achievement of the Short Fiction," in Modern Language Studies, Vol. XIX, No. 1, Winter, 1989, pp. 12-27.

In the following essay, Hall Petry discusses the differences between the short stories of Walker's In Love and Trouble and her stories in You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, asserting that the stories in the first collection are much stronger than those in the second.

There's nothing quite like a Pulitzer Prize to draw attention to a little known writer. And for Alice Walker, one of the few black writers of the mid-'60s to remain steadily productive for the two ensuing decades, the enormous success of 1982's The Color Purple has generated critical interest in a literary career that has been, even if not widely noted, at the very least worthy of note. As a poet (Once, 1968; Revolutionary Petunias, 1973) and a novelist (The Third Life of Grange...