“You Just Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down”
Alice Walker
Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, the eighth and last child of Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker, who were sharecroppers.
When Alice Walker was eight years old, she lost sight of one eye when one of her older brothers shot her with a BB gun by accident. In high school, Alice Walker was valedictorian of her class, and that achievement, coupled with a "rehabilitation scholarship" made it possible for her to go to Spelman, a college for black women in Atlanta.
After spending two years at Spelman, she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. During her junior year traveled to Africa as an exchange student. She received her bachelor of arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965.
After finishing college, Walker lived for a short time in New York, then from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, she lived in Jackson, Mississippi with her husband Melvyn Roseman Levanthal, during which time she had a daughter, Rebecca, in 1969.
Photo of Alice Walker, Mel Levanthal, and Rebecca Walker
Her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland was published in 1970, followed by a second novel, Meridian, in 1976.
During this time Walker also received applause for two collections of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1974) and You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down (1981), and two books of poetry, Revolutionary Petunias (1973) and Once (1976).
Nothing however prepared the critics for Alice Walker’s Pulitizer Prize winning novel The Color Purple. The story chronicles the life of a black African American girl called Celie, growing up in the Deep South.
However, the novel also garnered an enormous amount of criticism, especially in the Black community, for its negative portrayal of Black men
The novel was later made into a feature-length motion picture, directed by Steven Spielberg and in turn shot Alice Walker to overnight literary success.
Author Zora Neale Hurston is one of Walker’s most obvious and selfacknowledged influences and her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is often used as a textual comparison to The Color Purple.
Walker recognized Hurston’s influence on her life so much that she was once quoted as saying that if she were ever stranded on a desert island, Their Eyes Were Watching God would be the only book she’d need.
And in honor of her mentor, Walker traveled to Eatonville, FL and located Hurston’s unmarked grave. After uncovering her gravesite, Walker paid to have a gravestone marker created in honor of her inspiration.
Although Walker published the bulk of her work in the seventies and eighties, she is most often placed among great women writers who span the entire twentieth century. Some of these writers include Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Zora Neale Hurston.
Historical Firsts
Did you know... that Alice Walker and her ex-husband Melvyn Leventhal were the first legally married interracial couple to live in the state of Mississippi? Did you know... that Alice Walker created and taught the first class in the country dedicated to African-American Women Writers at Wellesley College? Did you know... that Alice Walker was the first African-American ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction?
“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”
Alice Malsenior Walker