Alice Walker bio

Alice Walker (b. 1944) Alice Walker is an African American novelist, short-story writer, poet, essayist, and activist. Her most famous novel, The Color Purple, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983. Walker's creative vision is rooted in the economic hardship, racial terror, and folk wisdom of African American life and culture, particularly in the rural South. Her writing explores multidimensional kinships among women and embraces the redemptive power of social and political revolution. Walker began publishing her fiction and poetry during the latter years of the Black Arts movement in the 1960s. Her work, along with that of such writers as Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor, however, is commonly associated with the post-1970s surge in African American women's literature. Biography Alice Malsenior Walker was born in Eatonton on February 9, 1944, the eighth and youngest child of Minnie Tallulah Grant and Willie Lee Walker, who were sharecroppers. The precocious spirit that distinguished Walker's personality during her early years vanished at the age of eight, when her brother scarred and blinded her right eye with a BB gun in a game of cowboys and Indians. Teased by her classmates and misunderstood by her family, Walker became a shy, reclusive youth. Much of her embarrassment dwindled after a doctor removed the scar tissue six years later. Although Walker eventually became high school prom queen and class valedictorian, she continued to feel like an outsider, nurturing a passion for reading and writing poetry in solitude. In 1961 Walker left Eatonton for Spelman College, a prominent school for black women in Atlanta, on a state scholarship. During the two years she attended Spelman she became active in the civil rights movement. After transferring to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, Walker continued her studies as well as her involvement in civil rights. In 1962 she was invited to the home of Martin Luther King Jr. in recognition of her attendance at the Youth World Peace Festival in Finland. Walker also registered black voters in Liberty County, Georgia, and later worked for the New York City Department of Welfare. Two years after receiving her B.A. degree from Sarah Lawrence in 1965, Walker married Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a white civil rights attorney. They lived in Jackson, Mississippi, where Walker worked as the black history consultant for a Head Start program. She also served as the writer-inresidence for Jackson State College (later Jackson State University) and Tougaloo College. She completed her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, in 1969, the same year that her daughter, Rebecca Grant, was born. When her marriage to Leventhal ended by 1977, Walker moved to northern California, where she lives and writes today. Walker has taught African American women's studies to college students at Wellesley, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, Yale, Brandeis, and the University of California at Berkeley. She supports antinuclear and environmental causes, and her protests against the oppressive rituals of female circumcision in Africa and the Middle East make her a vocal advocate for international women's rights. Walker has served as a contributing editor of Ms. magazine, and she is a cofounder of Wild Tree Press. Walker's appreciation for her matrilineal literary history is evidenced by the numerous reviews and articles she has published to acquaint new generations of readers with writers like Zora Neale Hurston. The anthology she edited, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing ... and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (1979), was particularly instrumental in bringing Hurston's work back into print. In addition to her deep admiration for Hurston, Walker's literary influences include Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer, black Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks, South African novelist Bessie Head, and white Georgia writer Flannery O'Connor. Alice Walker Poetry The poems in Walker's first volume, Once (1968), are based on her experiences during the civil rights movement and her travels to Africa. Influenced by Japanese haiku and the philosophy of author Albert Camus, Once also contains meditations on love and suicide. Indeed, after Walker visited Africa during the summer of 1964, she had struggled with an unwanted pregnancy upon her return to college. She speaks openly in her writing about the mental and physical anguish she experienced before deciding to have an abortion. The poems in Once grew not only from the sorrowful period in which Walker contemplated death but also from her triumphant decision to reclaim her life. Many of the narrative poems of her second volume, Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973), revisit her southern past, while other verses challenge superficial political militancy. Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (1979) contains tributes to black political leaders and creative writers. In addition to a fourth volume of poetry, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1984), Walker has compiled her previously published verses in the collection Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965-1990 Complete (1991). In a review of Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth: New Poems (2003), Publishers Weekly highlighted the volume's spiritual and ecological topics and added that Walker "explor[es] and prais[es] friendship, romantic love, home cooking, the peace movement, ancestors, ethnic diversity, and particularly admirable strong women, among them the primatologist Jane Goodall." Short Fiction and Essays One of Walker's earliest stories, "To Hell with Dying," captured the attention of poet Langston Hughes, who included it in his 1967 anthology, The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers. In the tale, which is based on actual events, the joy and laughter of children rescue an old guitar player named Mr. Sweet from the brink of death year after year. The narrator—a girl at the start of the story—returns home as a young woman to "revive" Mr. Sweet, but with no success. After his death she inherits the bluesman's guitar and his enduring legacy of love. "To Hell with Dying" was reprinted in Walker's first collection of short fiction, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973). The thirteen stories in this volume feature black women struggling to transcend society's narrow definitions of their intelligence and virtue. Her second collection, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories (1982), continues her vivid portrayal of women's experiences by emphasizing such sensitive issues as rape and abortion. In 2000 Walker published a third collection of stories, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart. She has also written four children's books, including an illustrated version of To Hell with Dying (1988) and Finding the Green Stone (1991). Walker has published several volumes of essays and autobiographical reflections. In the 1983 collection In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, she introduced readers to a new ideological approach to feminist thought. Her term womanist characterizes black feminists who cherish women's creativity, emotional flexibility, and strength. Womanism is further used to suggest new ways of reading silence and subjugation in narratives of male domination. Other essay collections include The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996), which features Walker's account of her struggle with Lyme disease during the filming of The Color Purple, and Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit: After the Attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon (2002). Novels Like her short stories, Walker's six novels place more emphasis on the inner workings of African American life than on the relationships between blacks and whites. Her first book, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), details the sorrow and redemption of a rural black family trapped in a multigenerational cycle of violence and economic dependency. Walker also fictionalizes a young civil rights activist's coming-of-age in the novel Meridian (1976). The Color Purple (1982) has generated the most public attention as a book and as a major motion picture, directed by Steven Spielberg in 1985. Narrated through the voice of Celie, The Color Purple is an epistolary novel—a work structured through a series of letters. Celie writes about the misery of childhood incest, physical abuse, and loneliness in her "letters to God." After being repeatedly raped by her stepfather, Celie is forced to marry a widowed farmer with three children. Yet her deepest hopes are realized with the help of a loving community of women, including her husband's mistress, Shug Avery, and Celie's sister, Nettie. Celie gradually learns to see herself as a desirable woman, a healthy and valuable part of the universe. Set in rural Georgia during segregation, The Color Purple brings components of nineteenth-century slave autobiography and sentimental fiction together with a confessional narrative of sexual awakening. Walker's harshest critics have condemned her portrayal of black men in the novel as "male-bashing," but others The Color Purple praise her forthright depiction of taboo subjects and her clear rendering of folk idiom and dialect. In 1985 the novel was adapted into a film, directed by Steven Spielberg. The musical stage adaptation premiered at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta in 2004 and opened on Broadway in 2005. Literary scholars often link The Color Purple with Walker's next two novels in an informal trilogy. Celie's granddaughter, Fanny, is a major character in The Temple of My Familiar (1989), and the protagonist of Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) is Tashi, the African wife of Celie's son. In Walker's novel By the Light of My Father's Smile (1998), strong sexual and religious themes intersect in a tale narrated from both sides of the grave. The novel features a family of African American anthropologists who journey to Mexico to study a tribe descended from former black slaves and Native Americans. In Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004) the main character, Kate, embarks on a literal and spiritual journey to find a way to accept the aging process. Walker says that Kate's search is necessary because the territory is largely "uncharted," and "people seem to lose their imagination about what women's lives can be after, say, 55 or 60." Reflecting upon the unique perspective and versatility of her literary career, Walker says, "One thing I try to have in my life and my fiction is an awareness of and openness to mystery, which, to me, is deeper than any politics, race, or geographical location." With elements of ancestral fable and spirituality, womanist insight, literary realism, and the grotesque, Walker's writing embodies an abundant cultural landscape of its own. Alice Walker (1944- ) Writer Recognized as one of the leading voices among black American women writers, Alice Walker has produced an acclaimed and varied body of work, including poetry, novels, short stories, essays, and criticism. Her writings portray the struggle of black people throughout history, and are praised for their insightful and riveting portraits of black life, in particular the experiences of black women in a sexist and racist society. Her most famous work, the award-winning and best-selling novel The Color Purple, chronicles the life of a poor and abused southern black woman who eventually triumphs over oppression through affirming female relationships. Walker has described herself as a "womanist" ó her term for a black feminist ó which she defines in the introduction to her book of essays, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, as one who "appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility ... women's strength" and is "committed to [the] survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female." A theme throughout Walker's work is the preservation of black culture, and her women characters forge important links to maintain continuity in both personal relationships and communities. According to Barbara T. Christian in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Walker is concerned with "heritage," which to Walker "is not so much the grand sweep of history or artifacts created as it is the relations of people to each other, young to old, parent to child, man to woman." Walker admires the struggle of black women throughout history to maintain an essential spirituality and creativity in their lives, and their achievements serve as an inspiration to others. In Our Mother's Gardens, Walker wrote: "We must fearlessly pull out of ourselves and look at and identify with our lives the living creativity some of our great-grandmothers were not allowed to know. I stress 'some' of them because it is well known that the majority of our great-grandmothers knew, even without 'knowing' it, the reality of their spirituality, even if they didn't recognize it beyond what happened in the singing at church ó and they never had any intention of giving it up." Walker frankly depicts the "twin afflictions" of racism and sexism Walker's women characters display strength, endurance, and resourcefulness in confronting ó and overcoming ó oppression in their lives, yet Walker is frank in depicting the often devastating circumstances of the "twin afflictions" of racism and sexism. "Black women are called, in the folklore that so aptly identifies one's status in society, the 'mule of the world,' because we have been handed the burdens that everyone else ó everyone else ó refused to carry," Walker stated in Our Mothers' Gardens. Mary Helen Washington in Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature noted that "the true empathy Alice Walker has for the oppressed woman comes through in all her writings.... Raising an ax, crying out in childbirth or abortion, surrendering to a man who is oblivious to her real name ó these are the kinds of images which most often appear in Ms. Walker's own writing." Washington adds that the strength of such images is that Walker gives insight into "the intimate reaches of the inner lives of her characters; the landscape of her stories is the spiritual realm where the soul yearns for what it does not have." Walker's beginnings as a writer are in the small rural town of Eatonton, Georgia, where she was the youngest of eight children of impoverished sharecroppers. Both of her parents were storytellers, and Walker was especially influenced by her mother, whom she described in Our Mothers' Gardens as "a walking history of our community." A childhood accident at the age of eight left Walker blind and scarred in one eye, which, partially corrected when she was fourteen, left a profound influence on her. "I believe ... that it was from this period ó from my solitary, lonely position, the position of an outcast ó that I began really to see people and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out.... I retreated into solitude, and read stories and began to write poems." Walker has commented that as a southern black growing up in a poor rural community, she possessed the benefit of "double vision." She explained in Our Mothers' Gardens: "Not only is the [black southern writer] in a position to see his own world, and its close community ... but he is capable of knowing, with remarkably silent accuracy, the people who make up the larger world that surrounds and suppresses his own." After wrestling with suicide she wrote her first book of poems Walker was an excellent student, and received a scholarship to Spelman College in Atlanta, and later to Sarah Lawrence College in the Bronx, New York. While in college, she became politically aware in the Civil Rights Movement and participated in many demonstrations. Her first book of poems, Once, was written while she was a senior at Sarah Lawrence and was accepted for publication the same year. Walker wrote many of the poems in the span of a week in the winter of 1965, when she wrestled with suicide after deciding to have an abortion. The poems recount the despair and isolation of her situation, in addition to her experiences in the Civil Rights Movement and of a trip she had made to Africa. Though not widely reviewed, Once marked Walker's debut as a distinctive and talented writer. Carolyn M. Rodgers in Negro Digest noted Walker's "precise wordings, the subtle, unexpected twists ... [and] shifting of emotions." Christian remarks that already in Once, Walker displayed what would become a feature of both her future poetry and fiction, an "unwavering honesty in evoking the forbidden, either in political stances or in love." Walker returned to the South after college and worked as a voter register in Georgia and an instructor in black history in Mississippi. She was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.'s message, as she recounted in Our Mothers' Gardens, that being a southern black meant "I ... had claim to the land of my birth." Walker continued to write poetry and fiction, and began to further explore the South she came from. She described in Our Mothers' Gardens of being particularly influenced by the Russian writers, who spoke to her of a "soul ... directly rooted in the soil that nourished it." She was also influenced by black writer Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote lively folk accounts of the thriving small, southern black community she grew up in. Walker stated in Our Mothers' Gardens how she particularly admired the "racial health" of Hurston's work: "A sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature." Critics have often objected to her portrayal of black males With the help of a 1967 McDowell fellowship, Walker completed her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, published in 1970. The novel depicts cycles of male violence in three generations of an impoverished southern black family (the Copelands), and displays Walker's interest in social conditions that affect family relationships, in addition to her recurring theme of the suffering of black women at the hands of men. The novel revolves around a father (Grange) who abandons his abused wife and young son (Brownfield) for a more prosperous life in the North, and returns years later to find his son similarly abusing his own family. Christian writes that the men in the novel are "thwarted by the society in their drive for control of their lives ó the American definition of manhood ó [and] vent their frustrations by inflicting violence on their wives." Critics praised the realism of the novel, CLA Journal contributor Peter Erickson, who noted that Walker demonstrated "with a vivid matter-of-factness the family's entrapment in a vicious cycle of poverty." However, Walker was also faulted for her portrayal of black men as violent, an aspect which is frequently criticized in her work. Walker responded to such criticism in an interview with Claudia Tate in "Black Women Writers at Work: "I know many Brownfields, and it's a shame that I know so many. I will not ignore people like Brownfield. I want you to know I know they exist. I want to tell you about them, and there is no way you are going to avoid them." Walker's short story collections, In Love and Trouble (1973) and You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (1981) expand upon the problems of sexism and racism facing black women. In Love and Trouble features thirteen black women protagonists ó many of them from the South ó who, as Christian notes, "against their own conscious wills in the face of pain, abuse, even death, challenge the conventions of sex, race, and age that attempt to restrict them." In Our Mothers' Gardens, Walker stated that her intent in the stories was to present a variety of women ó "mad, raging, loving, resentful, hateful, strong, ugly, weak, pitiful, and magnificent" ó as they "try to live with the loyalty to black men that characterizes all of their lives." Barbara Smith in Ms. praised the collection, stating it "would be an extraordinary literary work if its only virtue were the fact that the author sets out consciously to explore with honesty the textures and terror of black women's lives." Smith added: "The fact that Walker's perceptions, style, and artistry are also consistently high makes her work a treasure." The stories in You Can't Keep a Good Women Down represented an evolution in subject matter, as Walker delved more directly into mainstream feminist issues such as abortion, pornography, and rape. Although a number of critics remarked that the polemic nature of the stories detracted from their narrative effect, Walker again demonstrated, according to Christian, "the extent to which black women are free to pursue their own selfhood in a society permeated by sexism and racism." Walker explored similar terrain in her acclaimed 1976 novel, Meridian, in which she recounts the personal evolution of a young black woman against the backdrop of the politics of the Civil Rights Movement. Structurally complex, the novel raises questions of motherhood for the politicallyaware female, and the implications for the individual of being committed to revolution. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Marge Piercy praised Meridian as "a fine, taut novel that accomplishes a remarkable amount" and noted that Walker "writes with a sharp critical sense as she deals with the issues of tactics and strategy in the civil rights movement, with the nature of commitment, the possibility of interracial love and communication, the vital and lethal strands in American and black experience, with violence and nonviolence." The novel received much critical recognition and was praised for its deft handling of complex subject matter. Years after its publication, Robert Towers commented in the New York Review of Books that Meridian "remains the most impressive fictional treatment of the 'Movement' that I have yet read." In her 1982 novel, The Color Purple, Walker brought together many of the characters and themes of her previous works in a book which Peter S. Prescott in Newsweek proclaimed "an American novel of permanent importance." The Color Purple is a series of letters written by a southern black woman (Celie), reflecting a history of oppression and abuse suffered at the hands of the men. The book was resoundingly praised for its masterful recreation of black folk speech, in which, as Towers noted, Walker converts Celie's "subliterate dialect into a medium of remarkable expressiveness, color, and poignancy." Towers added: "I find it impossible to imagine Celie apart from her language; through it, not only a memorable and infinitely touching character but a whole submerged world is vividly called into being." The Color Purple became a Pulitzer Prize-winner The novel charts Celie's resistance to the oppression surrounding her, and the liberation of her existence through positive and supportive relations with other women. Christian notes that "perhaps even more than Walker's other works, [The Color Purple] especially affirms that the most abused of the abused can transform herself. It completes the cycle Walker announced a decade ago: the survival and liberation of black women through the strength and wisdom of others." The novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award, and was made into a popular motion picture which received several Academy Award nominations. Her 1989 novel, The Temple of My Familiar, described by Walker as "a romance of the last 500,000 years," represents a departure of sorts for the author, and critical opinion was mixed upon its publication. J. M. Coetzee in the New York Times Book Review described it as "a mixture of mythic fantasy, revisionary history, exemplary biography and sermon" which is "short on narrative tension, long on inspirational message." In the novel, Walker features six characters, three men and three women, who relate their views on life through recounting memories of ancestors and spirits from past cultures. While a number of reviewers faulted the ideological weight of the novel, others commented that the book remained faithful to the concerns of Walker's works. Luci Tapahonso noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that the novel focuses on familiar Walker themes, such as "compassion for the oppressed, the grief of the oppressors, acceptance of the unchangeable and hope for everyone and every thing." While Walker's works speak strongly of the experiences of black women, critics have commented that the messages of her books transcend both race and gender. According to Gloria Steinem in Ms., Walker "comes at universality through the path of an American black woman's experience.... She speaks the female experience more powerfully for being able to pursue it across boundaries of race and class." Jeanne Fox-Alston in the Chicago Tribune Book World called Walker "a provocative writer who writes about blacks in particular, but all humanity in general." In her 1988 prose collection, Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973-1977, Walker discusses, through essays and journal entries, topics such as nuclear weapons and racism in other countries. Noel Perrin in the New York Times Book Review wrote that although Walker's "original interests centered on black women, and especially on the ways they were abused or underrated ... now those interests encompass all creation." Derrick Bell commented in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that Walker "uses carefully crafted images that provide a universality to unique events." Living by the Word presents "vintage Alice Walker: passionate, political, personal, and poetic." ó Michael E. Muellero http://www.edwardsly.com/walkera.htm 2/2/06 Alice Walker was born in Georgia, the eighth child of tenant farmers. From early childhood, she endured violent racism, poverty and the injustice of the sharecropping system. Isolated and partially blinded by an injury to her eye, she nevertheless read widely and became an acute observer of her surroundings. Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), describes the racism-ravaged life of a black sharecropping family. In 1961, Walker entered Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia and immediately became involved in the civil rights movement. In 1963, she went on to Sarah Lawrence College, where she began to develop her gift for poetry. Many of her poems were published in her first collection, Once (1968). In 1967, she married the Jewish civil rights lawyer Melvyn Leventhal, with whom she had worked to further blacks' rights in Mississippi. Her second novel, Meridian (1976), which describes a woman's activity in the civil rights movement, won considerable attention. In her books, Walker extended her attacks on racial injustice to castigate the sexism she observed in some black American relationships. For this she was accused of distracting attention from the political oppression of black Americans at a time when the civil rights movement was beginning to make real headway. However, she was undeterred by criticism, and continued to expose the oppression of black women in sexual as well as political situations. In The Color Purple (1982), she drew a searing picture of sexual abuse within a context of white racism, depicting the search for selfhood of the central figure, Celie, and her emergence as a strong creative individual through friendship with other women. The novel won public and critical acclaim and was awarded both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. In 1985, it was adapted for the cinema by Steven Spielberg. Walker has had published several collections of poems and short stories, as well as books on women's issues. Her interest in the connections between Africa and black America is apparent in two more recent novels, The Temple of My Familiar (1989) and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992). In 1998, By the Light of My Father's Smile was published, her first novel for 6 years, which explores links between sexuality and the spiritual.