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Alice Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. She wrote the novel The Color Purple (1982), for which she won the National Book Award for hardcover fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[1][2] She also wrote some other novels such as Meridian (1976) and The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970). An avowed feminist, Walker coined the term "womanist" to mean "A black feminist or feminist of color" in 1983.[3]

Early life

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Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, a rural farming town, to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant.[4][5] Both of Walker's parents were sharecroppers, though her mother also worked as a seamstress to earn extra money. Walker, the youngest of eight children, was first enrolled in school when she was just four years old at East Putnam Consolidated.[4][6]

When eight, Walker sustained an injury to her right eye after one of her brothers fired a BB gun.[6] Since her family did not have access to a car, Walker could not receive immediate medical attention, causing her to become permanently blind in that eye. It was after the injury to her eye that Walker began to take up reading and writing.[4] The scar tissue was removed later when Walker was 14, but a mark still remains. It is described in her essay "Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self."[7][6]

As the schools in Eatonton were segregated, Walker attended the only high school available to blacks: Butler Baker High School.[6] She went there to become valedictorian and enrolled in Spelman College in 1961 after being granted a full scholarship by the state of Georgia for having the highest academic achievements of her class.[4] She found two of her professors, Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynd, to be great mentors during her time at Spelman, but transferred two years later.[6] Walker was offered another scholarship, this time from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and after the firing of her Spelman professor, Howard Zinn, Walker accepted the offer.[7] Walker became pregnant at the start of her senior year and proceeded to have an abortion; this experience, as well as the bout of suicidal thoughts that followed, inspired much of the poetry found in Once, Walker's first collection of poetry.[7] Walker graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1965.[7]

Writing career

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Walker wrote the poems of her first book of poetry, Once, while she was a student in East Africa and during her senior year at Sarah Lawrence College.[8] Walker would slip her poetry under the office door of her professor and mentor, Muriel Rukeyser, when she was a student at Sarah Lawrence. Rukeyser then showed the poems to her agent. Once was published four years later by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.[9][10]

Following graduation, Walker briefly worked for the New York City Department of Welfare, before returning to South. She took a job working for the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Jackson, Mississippi.[11] Walker also worked as a consultant in black history to the Friends of the Children of Mississippi Head Start program. She later returned to writing as writer-in-residence at Jackson State University (1968–69) and Tougaloo College (1970–71). In addition to her work at Tougaloo College, Walker published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, in 1970. The novel explores the life of Grange Copeland, an abusive, irresponsible sharecropper, husband and father.

In the fall of 1972, Walker taught a course in Black Women's Writers at the University of Massachusetts Boston.[12] One year later, before becoming editor of Ms. Magazine, Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, and scholar Charlotte D. Hunt discovered an unmarked grave they thought was Hurston's in Ft. Pierce, Florida. Walker had it marked with a gray marker stating ZORA NEALE HURSTON / A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH / NOVELIST FOLKLORIST / ANTHROPOLOGIST / 1901–1960.[13][14] The line "a genius of the south" is from Jean Toomer's poem Georgia Dusk, which appears in his book Cane.[14] Hurston was actually born in 1891, not 1901.[15][16]

Walker's 1975 article "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," published in Ms. Magazine, helped revive interest in the work of this African-American writer and anthropologist.[17]

In 1976, Walker's second novel, Meridian, was published. Meridian is a novel about activist workers in the South, during the civil rights movement, with events that closely parallel some of Walker's own experiences. She published what has become her best-known work, The Color Purple, in 1982. The novel follows a young, troubled black woman fighting her way through not just racist white culture but patriarchal black culture as well. The book became a bestseller and was subsequently adapted into a critically acclaimed 1985 movie directed by Steven Spielberg, featuring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg, as well as a 2005 Broadway musical totaling 910 performance.

Walker has written several other novels, including The Temple of My Familiar and Possessing the Secret of Joy (which featured several characters and descendants of characters from The Color Purple). She has also published a number of collections of short stories, poetry, and other writings. Her work is focused on the struggles of black people, particularly women, and their lives in a racist, sexist, and violent society.[18][19][20][21][22]

In 2000, Walker released a collection of short fiction, based on her own life, called The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart, exploring love and race relations. In this book, Walker details her interracial relationship with Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a civil rights attorney who was also working in Mississippi.[23] The couple married on March 17, 1967 in New York City, since interracial marriage was then illegal in the South, and divorced in 1976.[24] They had a daughter, Rebecca, together in 1969.[25] Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker's only child, is an American novelist, editor, artist, and activist. The Third Wave Foundation, an activist fund, was founded with the help of Rebecca.[26][27] Her godmother is Alice Walker's mentor and co-founder of Ms. Magazine, Gloria Steinem.[26]

In 2007, Walker donated her papers, consisting of 122 boxes of manuscripts and archive material, to Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.[28] In addition to drafts of novels such as The Color Purple, unpublished poems and manuscripts, and correspondence with editors, the collection includes extensive correspondence with family members, friends and colleagues, an early treatment of the film script for The Color Purple, syllabi from courses she taught, and fan mails. The collection also contains a scrapbook of poetry compiled when Walker was 15, entitled "Poems of a Childhood Poetess."

In 2013, Alice Walker published two new books, one of them entitled The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm's Way. The other was a book of poems entitled The World Will Follow Joy Turning Madness into Flowers (New Poems).

Activism and political criticism

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Alice Walker (left) and Gloria Steinem on the fall 2009 cover of Ms. magazine

Civil rights

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Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. when she was a student at Spelman College in the early 1960s. She credits King for her decision to return to the American South as an activist in the Civil Rights Movement. She took part in the 1963 March on Washington. Later, she volunteered to register black voters in Georgia and Mississippi.[29][30]

On March 8, 2003, International Women's Day, on the eve of the Iraq War, Walker was arrested with 26 others, including fellow authors Maxine Hong Kingston and Terry Tempest Williams, at a protest outside the White House, for crossing a police line during an anti-war rally. Walker wrote about the experience in her essay "We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For."[31]

Womanism

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Walker's specific brand of feminism included advocacy of women of color. In 1983, Walker coined the term "womanist" in her collection In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, to mean "a black feminist or feminist of color." The term was made to unite women of color and the feminist movement at "the intersection of race, class, and gender oppression."[32] Walker states that, "'Womanism' gives us a word of our own." [33] because it is a discourse of Black women and the issues they confront in society. Womanism as a movement came into fruition in 1985 at the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature to address Black women's concerns from their own intellectual, physical, and spiritual perspectives."[32]


Minor Edit, Copied from [[AliceWalker]]

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  1. ^ "National Book Awards - 1983". National Book Foundation. Retrieved March 15, 2012. (With essays by Anna Clark and Tarayi Jones from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
  2. ^ "The 1983 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Fiction". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2019-03-25. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |dead-url= (help)
  3. ^ "Document". gseweb.gse.buffalo.edu. Retrieved 2018-03-26.
  4. ^ a b c d Bates, Gerri (2005). Alice Walker: A Critical Companion. Greenwood Press. OCLC 62321382.
  5. ^ Moore, Geneva Cobb, and Andrew Billingsley. Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature: From Phillis Wheatley to Toni Morrison. University of South Carolina Press, 2017, OCLC 974947406.
  6. ^ a b c d e The Officers of the Alice Walker Literary Society. "About Alice Walker". Alice Walker Literary Society. Retrieved June 15, 2015.
  7. ^ a b c d World Authors 1995-2000, 2003. Biography Reference Bank database. Retrieved April 10, 2009.
  8. ^ "Once (1968)". Alice Walker The Official Website for the American Novelist & Poet. Retrieved March 12, 2017.
  9. ^ "Muriel Rukeyser was 21 when he ..." Washington Post. 2001-09-16. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2018-03-26.
  10. ^ World Authors 1995-2000, 2003. Biography Reference Bank database. Retrieved April 10, 2009.
  11. ^ The Officers of the Alice Walker Literary Society. "About Alice Walker". Alice Walker Literary Society. Retrieved June 15, 2015.
  12. ^ [1] Interview with Barbara Smith, May 7–8, 2003. p. 50. Retrieved July 19, 2017
  13. ^ "A Headstone for an Aunt: How Alice Walker Found Zora Neale Hurston - The Urchin Movement". www.urchinmovement.com.
  14. ^ a b Deborah G. Plant (2007). Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 57–. ISBN 978-0-275-98751-0.
  15. ^ Boyd, Valerie (2003). Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner. p. 17. ISBN 978-0-684-84230-1.
  16. ^ Hurston, Lucy Anne (2004). Speak, So You Can Speak Again: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Doubleday. p. 5. ISBN 978-0-385-49375-8.
  17. ^ Miller, Monica (December 17, 2012). "Archaeology of a Classic". News & Events. Barnard College. Retrieved June 14, 2014.
  18. ^ "Alice Walker Booking Agent for Corporate Functions, Events, Keynote Speaking, or Celebrity Appearances". celebritytalent.net. Retrieved 23 October 2015.
  19. ^ "Alice Walker". blackhistory.com. Retrieved 23 October 2015.
  20. ^ "Alice Walker". biblio.com. Retrieved 23 October 2015.
  21. ^ Molly Lundquist. "The Color Purple - Alice Walker - Author Biography - LitLovers". litlovers.com. Retrieved 23 October 2015.
  22. ^ "Analyzing Characterization and Point of View in Alice Walker's Short Fiction". Archived 2013-05-14 at the Wayback Machine
  23. ^ Campbell, Duncan (2001-02-25). "Interview: Alice Walker". the Guardian. Retrieved 2018-03-26.
  24. ^ World Authors 1995-2000, 2003. Biography Reference Bank database. Retrieved April 10, 2009.
  25. ^ The Officers of the Alice Walker Literary Society. "About Alice Walker". Alice Walker Literary Society. Retrieved June 15, 2015.
  26. ^ a b Rosenbloom, Stephanie (2007-03-18). "Alice Walker - Rebecca Walker - Feminist - Feminist Movement - Children". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2018-03-26.
  27. ^ test (2011-01-05). "Third Wave Foundation". Center for Nonprofit Excellence in Central New Mexico. Retrieved 2018-03-26.
  28. ^ Justice, Elaine (December 18, 2007). "Alice Walker Places Her Archive at Emory" (Press release). Emory University.
  29. ^ Walker Interview transcript and audio file on "Inner Light in A time of darkness", Democracy Now! Retrieved February 10, 2010.
  30. ^ "Pulitzer-Winning Writer Alice Walker & Civil Rights Leader Bob Moses Reflect on an Obama Presidency", Democracy Now! video on the African-American vote, January 20, 2009. Retrieved February 10, 2010.
  31. ^ "Global Women Launch Campaign to End Iraq War" (Press release). CodePink: Women for Peace. January 5, 2006. Archived from the original on April 9, 2010. Retrieved February 12, 2010. {{cite press release}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  32. ^ a b Deeper shades of purple : womanism in religion and society. Floyd-Thomas, Stacey M., 1969-. New York: New York University Press. 2006. ISBN 978-0814727522. OCLC 64688636.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  33. ^ Wilma Mankiller and others, "Womanism". The Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History. December 1, 1998. SIRS Issue Researcher. Indian Hills Library, Oakland, NJ. January 9, 2013, p. 1.
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