The Third Life of Grange Copeland

by Alice Walker

Book Overview

Despondent over the futility of life in the South, black tenant farmer Grange Copeland leaves his wife and son in Georgia to head North. After meeting an equally humiliating existence there, he returns to Georgia, years later, to find his son, Brownfield, imprisoned for the murder of his wife. As the guardian of the couple's youngest daughter, Grange Copeland is looking at his third -- and final -- chance to free himself from spiritual and social...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156899604
• ISBN13: 9780156899604
• Release Date: January 1977
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
• Length: 247 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A Best

I was mesmerized by this book. I believe it is her best.

Who's the bad guy here?

Is the perpetual question that comes up through successive parts of the novel. Is it the younger Grange Copeland when you see his behavior toward his wife and child?Is it his son Brownfield, the eventual killer of his wife?Is it the Jim Crow South that created the poisoned conditions under which such destrction could be wrought on a family? Is it the Northerners who brought deluded dreams that the black Southerners had of a free and better life in the North?As expected, this is one of Walker's novels that was written when she was "young and hungry," and the care that she takes to lead the reader in sundry directions is painstaking and evident.A must read or anyone who is sufficiently cerebral to look for latent meanings.

A Surefire MUST read especially in these times!

Alice Walker has done an amazing job with this story! Not only are the characters thouroughly complex and engaging, their depictions are refreshingly honest and human. The reader will find that no masks are worn in this story. The good and the bad of each are shown, and their internal struggles with this are expressed so well that readers themselves are allowed to determine at most what is just from what isnt and if not, at least why the characters are who they are. I will not describe the story in detail because I believe that it should unfold as a person reads. I will however say that the story itself is about relationships; familial, love, personal, communal, and societal; as well as struggle. However, what this story spends a great deal of time capturing and developing is what it means emotionally and psychologically, to be a poor black sharecropper and a man, living a dehumanizing and de-"man"izing existence in the South, during the beginning - mid part of the past hundred years. If you read this book and are not moved and educated by its story, stop what you're doing and read the book again, you have missed something big.This book makes my personal top 10 list and has opened me up to the world of Alice Walker. I will recommend this book to EVERYONE I know who is interested a well written, informative, and inspiring, quick, great read! Also recommended are "A Gathering of Old Men" and "In My Fathers House", both by Ernest Gaines. These two books also deal with the complexities and struggles of defining and reclaiming African-American manhood, around this same time period.

A very interesting book

The Third Life of Grange Copeland is a superb book. The book spans three generations of the Copeland family.This book kept me interested because it demonstrates how a person can make sacrifices even in the worst of circumstances Grange Copeland tries to rectify his past(troubled son) by protecting his future (grand-daughter's life). Can he accomplish both? Find out and read the book!