About Alice Walker

Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia. Her mother, Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker, and her father, Willie Lee Walker, were poor sharecroppers. As the eighth and youngest child in the family, she grew up in the midst of violent racism, which combined with her family's poverty left a permanent impression on her writing.

In the summer of 1952 Alice Walker was blinded in her right eye by a BB gun pellet while playing "cowboys and Indians" with her brothers. She was left with permanent damage in her eye and remained facially disfigured. At age 14, her brother Bill had the "cataract" removed for her by a doctor in Boston, but her vision never returned in that eye.

After graduating high school in 1961 as the school's valedictorian and prom queen, Alice entered Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia on a scholarship. While at Spelman she participated in civil rights demonstrations and was subsequently invited to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s home in 1962 at the end of her freshman year. The invitation was in recognition of her invitation to attend the Youth World Peace Festival in Helsinki, Finland. She attended the conference and then traveled throughout Europe for the summer. In August of 1963 Alice went to Washington D.C. to participate in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. While there she was able to hear Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" address.

After two years at Spelman, Alice received a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where she became one of very few young blacks to attend the prestigious school. Sarah Lawrence gave Walker the chance to receive mentoring from the poet Muriel Ruykeyser and writer Jane Cooper. Together they helped to stimulate her interest and talent in writing, and inspired her to write poems that eventually appeared in Once (1968).

Unfortunately, by senior year Alice Walker was suffering from extreme depression, likely due to the fact that she got pregnant. She considered committing suicide and at times kept a razor blade under her pillow. She also wrote several volumes of poetry in an effort to explain her feelings. She was able to have a safe abortion with a classmate's help, not the easiest procedure at the time. While recovering, Walker wrote a short story aptly titled "To Hell With Dying." Her mentor Muriel Ruykeyser sent the story to publishers as well as to the poet Langston Hughes. The story was published and Walker received a hand-written note of encouragement from Hughes.

Always an activist, she participated in the civil rights movement following her graduation in 1965. She first went door-to-door in Georgia and encouraged voter registration, but quickly moved to New York City and worked in the city's welfare department. While there she won a writing fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference.

In the summer of 1966 she returned to Mississippi where she met a Jewish civil rights law student named Mel Leventhal. They soon married and moved back to Mississippi. The couple had to deal with threats of violence due to the inter-racial nature of their marriage and the fact that Leventhal practiced on behalf of the NAACP. Alice again got pregnant (which saved Leventhal from the Vietnam draft) but sadly lost the child.

Even while pursuing civil rights, Alice found time to write. She wrote an essay titled "The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?," which won her a first place in the American Scholar magazine annual essay contest. Encouraged by this, she applied for and won a writing fellowship to the prestigious MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. She subsequently accepted a teaching position at Jackson State University and while there she published her first volume of poetry, "Once." Her first novel, "The Third Life of Grange Copeland," was published the same week her daughter Rebecca Grant was born. The novel received both literary praise and criticism, with many African-American critics claiming that Walker dealt too harshly with the black male characters in her book. Walker disputed such claims, but her writing would continue to dramatize the oppression of woman thereafter.

Alice Walker's career took off as she quickly moved from a position at Tougaloo College to a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute. In 1972 she accepted a teaching position at Wellesley College, where she created one of the first women's studies courses in the nation, a women's literature course. In 1976 she published her second novel, Meridian, a story that chronicled a young woman's struggle during the civil rights movement. On a personal level, she divorced Leventhal in the mid-70s.

Meridian received such acclaim that Walker accepted a Guggeheim Fellowship to concentrate full-time on her writing. She moved to San Francisco, and while in California she fell in love with Robert Allen, the editor of Black Scholar. They moved to a home in Mendocino where she began to write full time. Walker published her second book of short stories, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down.

In 1982 she finished The Color Purple, an epistolary novel about the life of a poor black woman named Celie. This book, easily her most popular novel, won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 and the American Book Award. Critics again accused her of portraying black men too harshly. The Color Purple was soon made into a motion picture, produced by Quincy Jones and directed by Steven Spielberg. When the movie The Color Purple premiered in her hometown of Eatonton, Walker received a parade in her honor. Her sister Ruth even created "The Color Purple Foundation" to promote charitable work for education.

In 1984 Walker published her third volume of poetry, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful. In 1988 her second book of essays, Living By the Word was published, and in 1989 she published her epic novel The Temple of My Familiar. Alice continued publishing, including: Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems and Possessing the Secret of Joy.

A later novel, The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, dealt with her budding realization that she might be bi-sexual. Alice Walker soon became more politically active in her writings; her non-fiction book Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism contained many essays inspired by her political activism. This included activities in the civil rights movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the environmental movement, the women's movement, and the movement to protect indigenous people.

After a six year interlude, in September of 1998 Walker published By the Light of My Father's Smile which examined the connections between sexuality and spirituality. The story is a multi-narrated account of several generations and explores the relationships of fathers and daughters.

A remarkable feature of Alice Walker's writing is the way it draws on elements of her life and incorporates them flawlessly into her novels. Her disfigurement can be seen in The Color Purple via the character of Celie, who suffers from a lack of beauty yet still manages to grow stronger in spite of that. On Alice's mother's side, her great-grandmother Talluhah was mostly Cherokee Indian. This connection emerges in The Color Purple as well, in the form of Corrine, who is of Cherokee decent.