alice walker
Alice Walker biography
Synopsis
Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. She worked as a social worker, teacher and lecturer and took part in the 1960s civil rights movement in Mississippi. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 1982 novel The Color Purple, and she's also an acclaimed poet and essayist.
Early Life
Novelist, poet and feminist Alice Malsenior Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. Alice Walker is one of the most admired African-American writers working today. She grew up poor as the youngest daughter of sharecroppers. Her mother also worked as a maid to help support the family's eight children. When she was eight years old, she suffered a serious injury. Walker was shot in the right eye with a BB pellet while playing with two of her brothers. Whitish scar tissue formed in her damaged eye, and she became self-conscious of this visible mark.
After the incident, Walker largely withdrew from the world around her. "For a long time I thought I was very ugly and disfigured," she told John O'Brien in an interview published in Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present. "This made me shy and timid, and I often reacted to insults and slights that were not intended." She found solace in reading and writing poetry.
Living in the racially divided South, Walker attended segregated schools. She graduated from her high school as the valedictorian of her class. With the help of a scholarship, Walker was able to go to Spelman College in Atlanta. She later switched to Sarah Lawrence College in New York City. While at Sarah Lawrence, Walker visited Africa as part of a study-abroad program. She graduated in 1965—the same year she published her first short story.
Early Works
After college, Walker worked as a social worker, teacher and lecturer. She became active in the Civil Rights Movement, fighting for equality for all African Americans. Her experiences informed her first collection of poetry, Once, which was published in 1968. Better known now as a novelist, Walker showed her talents for storytelling in her debut work Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970).
Walker continued to explore writing in all of its forms. In 1973, she published a set of short stories In Love and Trouble, the poetry collection Revolutionary Petunias and her first children's book Langston Hughes: American Poet. Walker also emerged as a prominent voice in the black feminist movement.
The Color Purple
Walker's career as a writer took flight with the publication of her third novel The Color Purple in 1982. Set in the early 1900s, the novel explores the female African American experience through the life and struggles of its narrator Celie. Celie suffers terrible abuse at the hands of her father and later her husband. The compelling work won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction the following year.
Three years later, Walker's story made it on to the big screen. Steven Spielberg directed The Color Purple, which starred Whoopi Goldberg as Celie.
The cast also included Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. Like the novel, the movie was a critically success and received 11 Academy Award nominations. Walker explored her own feelings about the film in her 1996 work The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult. Walker's famed novel later went through another transformation. In 2005, The Color Purple became a Broadway musical.
Walker incorporated characters and their relations from The Color Purple into two of her other novels—The Temple of My Familiar (1989) and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992). Possessing the Secret of Joy earned great critical praise and caused some controversy for its exploration of the practice of female genital mutilation.
Recent Works
Walker has proved time and time again to be a versatile writer. Her most recent novel was 2004's Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart. She published a collection of essays We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Light in a Time of Darkness and the well-received picture book There Is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me—both in 2006.
Politically active as ever, Walker has also wrote about her experiences working with Women for Women International in 2010's Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel. She published another poetry collection, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, that same year.
After more than four decades as a writer, Alice Walker shows no signs of slowing down. She just released The Chicken Chronicles in 2012. She ruminates on caring for her flock of chickens in this latest memoir. Her next work, The Cushion in the Road, is a collection of mediations on a variety of subjects and will be published in 2013.
Personal Life
Alice Walker married activist Melvyn Leventhal in 1967. The couple had one daughter, Rebecca Walker, before divorcing in 1976.
Quick Facts
Best Known For
Alice Walker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, African-American novelist and poet most famous for her book The Color Purple.
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