The Third Life of Grange Copeland was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1970 — Walker’s first novel, written when she was twenty-six. The novel spans three generations of the Copeland family in rural Georgia. Grange Copeland, a sharecropper, is brutalized by the economic system that keeps him in perpetual debt to white landowners. He responds by brutalizing his wife and son, then abandons both and flees north to New York. His son Brownfield, raised in the wreckage of this abandonment, repeats the cycle: marrying an educated woman and systematically destroying her through violence, jealousy, and domination.
Grange’s “third life” comes when he returns to Georgia, reformed by his time in the North (where he discovered that racism was not confined to the South and that self-hatred was not the answer to oppression), and attempts to raise Brownfield’s daughter Ruth as the one Copeland who might escape the cycle. The novel’s argument is structural: Walker shows how the sharecropping system — its deliberate maintenance of Black poverty, its daily humiliations — produces damaged men who then damage their families. But she refuses to let structural analysis become an excuse: Brownfield chooses his violence, and the novel holds him accountable even as it explains him.
Walker’s prose here is plainer and more conventionally realist than in her later work, but the themes that would define her career are already present: the relationship between economic oppression and domestic violence, the particular burden borne by Black women (who suffer both racial oppression and gendered violence from their own communities), and the possibility of redemption through love and moral courage.
Collecting The Third Life of Grange Copeland
First edition (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1970): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $200–$600
- Very good: $80–$200
- Signed: $400–$1,000