Lauren is a former Deputy Editor of The Root.
Suggested Reading
Ntozake Shange's work was first staged in 1975 in San Francisco. Two years later, the choreopoem was published as a book, creating countless fans of Shange's work.
Tyler Perry would not have been most For Colored Girls fans' first choice as writer and director of a movie based on Shange's play. Many believe that the commercially successful but critically panned filmmaker did not have the chops to make something beautiful out of Shange's words. Are they right? One early review describes the film as a train wreck.
This classic Alice Walker novel, published in 1982, tells a heartbreaking but ultimately uplifting story centered around Celie, a woman used and abused by her father and husband. Walker won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for the book.
When Stephen Spielberg announced that he was directing the film version of the book, fans were in an uproar. Did a white man have what it takes to create a film out of Alice Walker's complex material? Whether or not lovers of the book liked the movie, which starred Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover, it was a commercial and critical success, receiving 11 Academy Award nominations. Twenty years later, the novel was successfully adapted as a musical on Broadway.
One of Toni Morrison's most famous books, Beloved, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel dealing with heavy topics, including slavery and infanticide.
Oprah Winfrey, a huge fan of Toni Morrison and Beloved, produced and starred in the 1998 film version. Winfrey had Morrison's blessing, but some book fans and critics of the film may have wished that the talk-show queen had left their beloved novel alone.
Richard Wright's seminal protest novel, which tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man who commits two grisly murders, was a best-seller when it was released in 1940, and it made Wright the wealthiest black author of his time.
Communist themes and a homicidal protagonist don't make Native Son the simplest book to make into a movie. No one knows this better than director Jerrold Freedman, who was criticized for sanitizing the story for his 1986 film starring Victor Love, Oprah Winfrey (again) and Matt Dillon.
Taught in schools across the country, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the literary masterpieces to come out of the Harlem Renaissance.
Is Halle Berry a good-enough actress to play protagonist Janie? Will Oprah do the novel justice? These questions were asked in 2005 when Winfrey produced a TV-movie adaptation of the book for ABC. The movie was nominated for some mainstream awards, but some members of the black press were unhappy with it.
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