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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.

Walker's writings include novels, stories, essays and poems. They focus on the struggles of African-Americans, and particularly African-American women, against societies that are racist, sexist, and often violent. Her writings tend to emphasize the strength of black women and the importance of African-American heritage and culture.

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.

She won the 1986 O. Henry Award for her short story "Kindred Spirits" published in Esquire magazine in August of 1985.

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. Her daughter, Rebecca Walker, is also a prominent activist.

During her youth, an incident left Alice with a permanent injury that would soon scar her for life. While playing with her brothers, she was accidentally shot in the eye, and forced to get a glass replacement because of people's attitudes toward her.

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. Quoth Johnson: "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.

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

Possessing the Secret Joy, she developes Tashi, a character who appeared in The Color Purple and The Temple of My Familiar. She undergoes female circumcision out of loyalty to the Olinka tribe. The novel depicts her pain and trauma and amounts to an expose of a barbaric human rights violation. Some would have prefered she remain silent on the issue.

Selected works

Novels and short story collections

• The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)
• 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)
• Everyday Use (1973)
• 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

See also

• African American literature

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