Despite winning several prestigious literary awards of the day, when it first appeared, Alice Walker's The Color Purple generated critical unease over puzzling aspects of its compositions.

The first is a critical appreciation by Sir Frank Kermode, who, at 90, is one of the grand old men of British literary scholarship.

In 1991, an American librarian published a literary critical essay, apparently by a Swiss professor, entitled "a first look at Nabokov's last novel", which was quickly exposed as a brilliant spoof.