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Revision as of 02:41, 20 April 2011 by 68.228.62.83 (talk) (→Early life)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff) For the British Olympic fencer, see Alice Walker (fencer).| Alice Walker | |
|---|---|
 Alice Walker | |
| Occupation | Novelist, short story writer, poet |
| Genre | African American literature |
| Notable works | The Color Purple |
| Notable awards | Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1983 National Book Award 1983 |
| Website | |
| http://www.alicewalkersgarden.com | |
Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an African American author and poet. She has written both fiction and essays about race and gender. She is best-known for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Early life
Alice Malsenior Walker was born at home on February 9, 1944, under the sign of Aquarius in the countryside near Ward’s Chapel, a neighboring community of Eatonton, Georgia. She is the eighth and last child of Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant Walker. In 1994, Walker changed her middle name to Tallulah-Kate, in honor of her maternal great-grandmother, the African-Cherokee ancestor Tallulah Calloway, and of Kate Nelson, her paternal grandmother.
As a self-described “daughter of the rural peasantry,” Walker grew up in a loving household in the years following the end of the Great Depression. Though poor, the family was rich in kindness and perspective. From her parents and siblings, Walker learned to value the beauty in nature. Her family also nurtured Walker’s artistic aspirations, which included painting and music along with writing. Walker was particularly close to her mother, Minnie Lou Walker, whose fearlessness, love of beauty, and legendary gardening skills are celebrated in Walker’s landmark essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.”
Perhaps the most shaping experience of Walker’s childhood and adolescence occurred in 1952 when she was eight years old. Playing cowboys and Indians with her older brothers Curtis and Bobby, Curtis accidentally shot Walker in the eye with a BB gun. To avoid punishment, the brothers concocted a fiction and pressured their sister to accept it. The physical result was that Walker lost the sight in her right eye, which developed a disfiguring white scar. Psychologically, Walker grew more introspective, contending with feelings of sadness, alienation, and betrayal. “An accident became,” as she recalled, “‘my accident’—thereby absolving my brothers of any blame.”
In her biography of Walker, Evelyn White provides us with the writer’s most current observations on this event, one that in many ways prepared the ground for her becoming a writer: “The unhappy truth is that I was left feeling a great deal of pain and loss and forced to think I had somehow brought it on myself,” Walker remembers. “It was very like a rape. It was the first time I abandoned myself, by lying, and is at the root of my fear of abandonment. It is also the root of my need to tell the truth, always, because I experienced, very early, the pain of telling a lie.” Several years after her injury, when Walker was fourteen, her older brother William provided her with the resources and encouragement to undergo eye surgery. In place of a white “glob,” a tiny blue sphere now marks the place where Walker was shot. She describes the impact of this transforming surgery in the essay “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self.” Though vision remained lost, self-confidence was restored.
Activism
Alice Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. when she was a student at Spelman College in Atlanta in the early 1960s. Walker credits King for her decision to return to the American South as an activist for the Civil Rights Movement. She marched with hundreds of thousands in August in the 1963 March on Washington. As a young adult, she volunteered to register black voters in Georgia and Mississippi.
On March 8, 2003, International Women's Day, on the eve of the Iraq War, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior; and Terry Tempest Williams, author of An Unspoken Hunger were arrested along with 24 others for crossing a police line during an anti-war protest rally outside the White House. Walker and 5,000 activists associated with the organizations Code Pink and Women for Peace, marched from Malcolm X Park in Washington D.C. to the White House. The activists encircled the White House. In an interview with Democracy Now, Walker said, "I was with other women who believe that the women and children of Iraq are just as dear as the women and children in our families, and that, in fact, we are one family. And so it would have felt to me that we were going over to actually bomb ourselves." Walker wrote about the experience in her essay, "We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For."
In November 2008, Alice Walker wrote "An Open Letter to Barack Obama" that was published on Theroot.com. Walker addresses the newly elected President as "Brother Obama" and writes "Seeing you take your rightful place, based solely on your wisdom, stamina, and character, is a balm for the weary warriors of hope, previously only sung about."
In March 2009, Alice Walker traveled to Gaza along with a group of 60 other female activists from the anti-war group Code Pink, in response to the controversial Israeli offensive of December 2008-January 2009. Their purpose was to deliver aid, to meet with NGOs and residents, and to persuade Israel and Egypt to open their borders into Gaza. She planned to visit Gaza again in December 2009 to participate in the Gaza Freedom March.
Personal life
After high school, Walker went to Spelman College in Atlanta on a full scholarship in 1961 and later transferred to Sarah Lawrence College near New York City, graduating in 1965. Walker became interested in the U.S. civil rights movement in part due to the influence of activist Howard Zinn, who was one of her professors at Spelman College. Continuing the activism that she participated in during her college years, Walker returned to the South where she became involved with voter registration drives, campaigns for welfare rights, and children's programs in Mississippi.
Marriage and family
In 1965, Walker met and later married Melvyn Roseman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. They were married on March 17, 1967 in New York City. Later that year the couple relocated to Jackson, Mississippi, becoming "the first legally married inter-racial couple in Mississippi". They were harassed and threatened by whites, including the Ku Klux Klan. The couple had a daughter Rebecca in 1969. Walker described her in 2008 as "a living, breathing, mixed-race embodiment of the new America that they were trying to forge." Walker and her husband divorced amicably in 1976.
Walker and her daughter became estranged. Rebecca felt herself to be more of "a political symbol... than a cherished daughter". She published a memoir entitled Black White and Jewish, expressing the complexities of her parents' relationship and her childhood.
In the mid-1990s, Walker was involved in a romance with singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman.
Writing career
Walker's first book of poetry was written while she was a senior at Sarah Lawrence. She took a brief sabbatical from writing while working in Mississippi in the civil rights movement. Walker resumed her writing career when she joined Ms. magazine as an editor before moving to northern California in the late 1970s. Her 1975 article helped revive interest in the work of Zora Neale Hurston, who inspired Walker's writing and subject matter. In 1973, Walker and fellow Hurston scholar Charlotte D. Hunt discovered Hurston's unmarked grave in Ft. Pierce, Florida. The women collaborated to buy a modest headstone for the gravesite.
In addition to her collected short stories and poetry, Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, was published in 1970. In 1976, Walker's second novel, Meridian, was published. The novel dealt with activist workers in the South during the civil rights movement, and closely paralleled some of Walker's own experiences.
In 1982, Walker published what has become her best-known work, the novel The Color Purple. About a young troubled black woman fighting her way through not only racist white culture but also patriarchal black culture, it was a resounding commercial success. The book became a bestseller and was subsequently adapted into a critically acclaimed 1985 movie as well as a 2005 Broadway musical.
Walker has written several other novels, including The Temple of My Familiar and Possessing the Secret of Joy (which featured several characters and descendants of characters from The Color Purple). She has published a number of collections of short stories, poetry, and other published work.
She expresses the struggles of blacks, particularly women, and their lives in a racist, sexist, and violent society. Her writings also focus on the role of women of color in culture and history. Walker is a respected figure in the liberal political community for her support of unconventional and unpopular views as a matter of principle.
Her short stories include the 1973 Everyday Use, in which she discusses feminism, racism against blacks, and the issues raised by young black people who leave home and lose respect for their parents' culture.
In 2007, Walker gave her papers, 122 boxes of manuscripts and archive material, to Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. In addition to drafts of novels such as The Color Purple, unpublished poems and manuscripts, and correspondence with editors, the collection includes extensive correspondence with family members, friends and colleagues, an early treatment of the film script for The Color Purple, syllabi from courses she taught, and fan mail. The collection also contains a scrapbook of poetry compiled when Walker was 15, entitled "Poems of a Childhood Poetess".
In January 2009, she was one of over 50 signers of a letter protesting the Toronto Film Festival's "City to City" spotlight on Israeli filmmakers, condemning Israel as an "apartheid regime."
Selected awards and honors
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Color Purple (1983) (first black woman).
- National Book Award (First black woman)
- O. Henry Award for "Kindred Spirits" 1985.
- Honorary Degree from the California Institute of the Arts (1995)
- American Humanist Association named her as "Humanist of the Year" (1997)
- The Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts
- The Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters
- The Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, the Merrill Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship
- The Front Page Award for Best Magazine Criticism from the Newswoman's Club of New York
- Induction to the California Hall of Fame in The California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts (2006)
Selected works
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Notes
- Democracy Now - Walker Interview transcript and audio file on "Inner Light in A time of darkness", accessed 10 February 2010 ]
- Democracy Now video on the African American Vote Accessed 10 February 2010
- Press release "Notable Women Arrested Protesting Against the War with Iraq" Accessed 12 February 2010
- Open Letter to Obama Accessed February 2010
- Gaza Freedom March Accessed February 2010
- On Finding Your Bliss. Interview by Evelyn C. White October 1998 accessed 14 June 2007
- ^ Times article The day feminist icon Alice Walker resigned as my mother
- "Inner Light in a Time of Darkness: A Conversation with Author and Poet Alice Walker". Democracy Now!. 2006-11-17. Retrieved 2007-06-14.
{{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Daily Mail article by Rebecca Walker: How my mother's fanatical views tore us apart
- The Times article The day feminist icon Alice Walker resigned as my mother Accessed February 2010
- Guardian Article Friday 15 December 2006 - Interview with Walker No Retreat Accessed May 2010
- Extract from Alice Walker, Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism, The Women's Press Ltd, 1997
- Walker, Alice. "Everyday Use." Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, Comp. Thomas R. Arp. New York: Harcourt Brace College, 1994, pp. 90-97
- Justice, Elaine. "Alice Walker Places Her Archive at Emory" Emory University News, Dec. 18, 2007
- http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/sep/05/filmmakers-react-anti-israel-film-festival-protest/
References
White, Evelyn C. (2005). Alice Walker: A Life. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-32826-0. {{cite book}}: templatestyles stripmarker in |author= at position 1 (help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
Walker, Alice and Parmar, Pratibha (1993). Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women. Diane Books Publishing Company. ISBN 0-7881-5581-4. {{cite book}}: templatestyles stripmarker in |author= at position 1 (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
External links
- Alice Walker's Official Website
- Profile at the Poetry Foundation
- Profile at Poets.org
- Interview on the nature of a writer’s social responsibilities Lannan Foundation (Audio, 15 mins) August 21, 1987
- New Georgia Encyclopedia
- Interview with Alice Walker by ascent magazine
- Shambhala Sun Magazine Interview
- Alice Walker's archives at Emory University. Profile, audio files, archive at the James Weldon Johnson Institute, Emory
- "Toxic Culture of Globalization", from Democracy Now! October 27, 2004. "'I am a Renegade, an Outlaw, a Pagan' interview February 13, 2006. "Pacifica Radio at 60" April 15, 2009 "Overcoming Speechlessness" April 13, 2010
- 1944 births
- African American novelists
- African American writers
- Alumni of women's universities and colleges
- American feminist writers
- Feminist writers
- Womanist writers
- American humanists
- American novelists
- American poets
- American vegans
- Bisexual writers
- Black feminism
- Womanism
- LGBT African Americans
- LGBT feminists
- LGBT writers from the United States
- LGBT parents
- O. Henry Award winners
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners
- Spelman College alumni
- Wellesley College faculty
- Writers from Georgia (U.S. state)
- Living people