Having already made a name for herself with her first book of poems, Once: Poems (1968), and her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Walker found herself the center of a great deal of critical attention when In Love and Trouble came out in 1973. Louis Pratt and Darnell Pratt list twenty-nine reviews in their annotated bibliography, Alice Malsenior Walker, far more than usual for a first volume of short stories. The reviews were almost unanimously favorable, although a few reviewers found the stories uneven in quality.

One issue for writers of fiction at the end of the twentieth century is whether fiction that does not revolve around white men can be considered "universal." Often, books about white men are thought of as representing the "human condition," while books about women are thought to represent women, and books about black women are thought to represent black...