Alice Walker

Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an African-American author and feminist whose most famous novel, The Color Purple, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award.

Outspoken reputation

Walker's writings include novels, stories, essays and poems. They focus on the struggles of African Americans, particularly women, and they witness against societies that are racist, sexist, and violent. Her writings tend to emphasize black women's prominence in culture and history. She is also of Cherokee and Celtic descent.

Walker is respected on the left for her liberal attitude and for supporting unpopular views as a matter of principle. She is openly bisexual, and sympathetic of people of all sexualities, ethnicities, and races.

Biography

Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the United States. She attended Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia and graduated in 1965 from Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers (Bronxville postal zone), New York. Her first book of poetry was written while she was still a senior at Sarah Lawrence. She returned to the South to work in the U.S. civil rights movement.

Walker was also an editor for Ms. Magazine. An article she published in 1975 was largely responsible for the renewal of interest in the work of Zora Neale Hurston. Two years earlier Walker, along with fellow Hurston scholar Charlotte D. Hunt, discovered Hurston's unmarked grave in Ft. Pierce, FL. Both women paid for a modest headstone for the gravesite.

She won the 1986 O. Henry Award for her short story "Kindred Spirits", published in Esquire magazine in August of 2004.

A political activist (due in part to the influence of Howard Zinn), she is active in environmental, feminist, civil rights, and animal rights causes. She has advocated ending the decades-long embargo against Cuba. She was previously married to Mel Leventhal from 1967 to 1976, with whom she had a daughter, Rebecca Walker (also a prominent activist and writer).

During her youth, an incident left Alice partially blind. Her brothers were given types of guns to play with (her mother enjoyed cowboy movies playing at the time). Alice was not given a gun because she was a girl. Her brother "accidentally" shot Alice in the eye. Her parents referred to her injury as "Alice's accident". She speaks of this incident in her documentary turned book, "Warrior Marks" (a chronicle of female genital mutilation in Africa), and uses it to illustrate the sacrificial marks woman bear that allow them to be "warriors" against female suppression.

Walker has also chronicled her struggle with Lyme disease in The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996).

More indepth information on her life can be found at: http://members.tripod.com/chrisdanielle/index.html

Controversy

In the updated 1995 introduction to his novel Oxherding Tale, Charles Johnson engendered a political firestorm when he seemed to criticize Walker's The Color Purple for its negative portrayal of African-American males: "I leave it to readers to decide which book pushes harder at the boundaries of convention, and inhabits most confidently the space where fiction and philosophy meet." Such candor and criticism came as a shock to some in Academia, who felt Johnson violated an unspoken taboo against criticizing another writer of color. The novel had come under criticism for the same reasons earlier.

Selected works

Novels and short story collections

The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)
Everyday Use (1973)
In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973)
Meridian (1976)
The Color Purple (1982)
You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories (1982)
To Hell With Dying (1988)
The Temple of My Familiar (1989)
Finding the Green Stone (1991)
Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992)
The Complete Stories (1994)
By the Light of My Father's Smile (1998)
The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart (2000)
Now is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004)

Poetry collections

Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems (1973)
Once (1976)
Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (1979)
Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1985)
Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems (1991)
Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003)
A Poem Traveled Down My Arm: Poems And Drawings (2003)
Collected Poems (2005)

Non-fiction

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983)
Warrior Marks (1993)
The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996)
Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism (1997)
Letter to President Clinton
Go Girl!: The Black Woman's Book of Travel And Adventure (1997)
Pema Chodron and Alice Walker in Conversation (1999)
Sent By Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center And Pentagon (2001)
Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self
Women

This Page Created By: Jonathan M. Williams

External links

Video

"Alice Walker on the 'Toxic Culture' of Globalization", from Democracy Now! program, October 27, 2004
"'I am a Renegade, an Outlaw, a Pagan' - Author, Poet and Activist Alice Walker in Her Own Words", interview from Democracy Now! program, February 13, 2006

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