Overview

Alice Walker is an African-American writer and activist. As a writer, Walker is best known for The Color Purple, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and The National Book Award in 1983, and which was later made in a critically acclaimed film by Steven Spielberg and a Tony Award winning play on Broadway. Walker has also published books of poetry, essays, and other novels. A devoted social activist, Walker defends not only human rights, but the rights of all living beings.

She is perhaps best known for bringing female genital mutilation practiced in Africa to the attention of the West.

 

Early Life and Education

Alice Walker was born in Putnam County, Georgia, on February 9^th, 1944, the youngest of eight children. Her father was a sharecropper, never earning more than $300 in a year, and her mother worked eleven hours a day to earn the seventeen dollars a week it took to send her daughter to college, resisting, in the heart of the Jim Crow South, the pressure of the white plantation owner to put young Alice to work in the fields. It something Walker never forgot spoke often of throughout her life. Walker grew up with a rich oral storytelling tradition, especially from her grandfather, and this would shape the voice-heavy family narratives for which she would later become so acclaimed. After suffering an accident that left her right eye scarred when she was eight years old, the sensitive Walker became painfully shy and often found solace in books and in writing her own poetry.

After high school, Walker went on to Spelman College in Atlanta on a full scholarship and later transferred to Sarah Lawrence College. While at Sarah Lawrence, she wrote what would become her first book of poetry. While at Spelman, however, Walker became influenced by Howard Zinn, one of her professors, and after publishing, she took some time off from writing and returned to the South to join the Civil Rights Movement, where she worked on voter registration drives, welfare rights, and children’s social programs in Mississippi.

 

Life as a Writer and Activist

A devout feminist, Walker joined Ms. Magazine as an editor in the seventies. Many feel that her essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” for the magazine helped revive the interest in Hurston that continues to this day—Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God remains a staple in both university and even many high school curriculums to this day. Walker’s first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland was published in 1970 and her second, Meridian, which paralleled Walker’s experiences in the Civil Rights Movement, was published six years later. The book Walker will be forever known for, The Color Purple, was published in 1982. The book, written in an epistolary form as a series of letter between two African American sisters, one educated, one not, tells the excruciating, and in the end, heroic, tale of a woman’s eventual triumph over not just racism, but the brutal patriarchy of her own black culture. Walker has written several novels since, including The Temple of My Familiar and The Secret of Joy.

Walker’s activism continues with no signs of faltering and she continues to travel the world to speak on behalf of the world’s economically oppressed and socially marginalized. She’s made appearances in Africa, Iraq, and in anti-war protests outside the gates of the White House in Washington D.C. Alice Walker has been and remains the defender of the defenseless, the eloquent writer of the voiceless.