Walker, Alice (1944–)

The African American novelist, essayist, poet, short story writer, and political activist Alice Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, on February 9, 1944, the eighth child of parents who earned a living as sharecroppers. As a child, Walker was blinded in one eye during an accident. She focused her energy and attention on her schoolwork, graduating as valedictorian of her high school class. She won a scholarship to Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, which she attended from 1961 to 1963.

After leaving Spelman, Walker moved to New York, where she attended Sarah Lawrence College, also on a scholarship, and had the opportunity to travel to Africa in her junior year. She graduated with her bachelor's degree in 1965, at the height of the civil rights movement. She quickly became involved, participating in many demonstrations and other activities. She also wrote poetry during those years; her first book, the poetry collection once, was published in 1968.

In 1967, she was awarded a McDowell Fellowship, which offered her the financial support she needed to work on a novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, which was published 3 years later. The novel tells the stories of three generations of the Copelands, a southern black family, and explores their social relationships and the cycle of violence they perpetuate. She especially focuses on how black women suffer at the hands of black men, a depiction for which she was later criticized. All the same, she further developed the theme in two short-story collections, In Love and Trouble (1973) and You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (1981). She also completed a second novel, Meridian (1976).

Her masterpiece, The Color Purple, appeared in 1982 and marked her as one of the most talented novelists in America. The protagonist, Celie, is a young southern African American woman who recounts years of abuse and violence at the hands of black men, including her father and husband, in a series of letters. Celie struggles against this oppression and emerges personally liberated, aided by the strength of her relationships with other black women. Walker won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award in 1983.

That year, she also published an important essay collection, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, in which she discusses feminism. She calls herself a womanist rather than a feminist, defining the term as a person who appreciates the strength and social bonds of women and who is concerned with the equal rights of men and women. In addition to women's rights movements, Walker actively supports environmental and social justice causes. She continues to write prolifically in all genres, including a poetry collection, Absolute Truth in the Goodness of the Earth (2003).