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Alice Walker

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Alice WalkerAlice Walker
OccupationNovelist, short story writer, poet
GenreAfrican American literature
Notable worksThe Color Purple
Notable awardsPulitzer 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

Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children, to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant. Her father, who was, in her words, "wonderful at math but a terrible farmer," earned only $300 a year from sharecropping and dairy farming. Her mother supplemented the family income by working as a maid. She worked 11 hours a day for USD $17 per week to help pay for Alice to attend college.

Living under Jim Crow Laws, Walker's parents resisted landlords who expected the children of black sharecroppers to work the fields at a young age. A white plantation owner said to her that blacks had “no need for education.” Minnie Lou Walker said, "You might have some black children somewhere, but they don’t live in this house. Don’t you ever come around here again talking about how my children don’t need to learn how to read and write.” Her mother enrolled Alice in first grade at the age of four.

Growing up with an oral tradition, listening to stories from her grandfather (the model for the character of Mr. in The Color Purple), Walker began writing, very privately, when she was eight years old. "With my family, I had to hide things," she said. "And I had to keep a lot in my mind."

In 1952, Walker was accidentally wounded in the right eye by a shot from a BB gun fired by one of her brothers. Because the family had no car, the Walkers could not take their daughter to a hospital for immediate treatment. By the time they reached a doctor a week later, she had become permanently blind in that eye. When a layer of scar tissue formed over her wounded eye, Alice became self-conscious and painfully shy. Stared at and sometimes taunted, she felt like an outcast and turned for solace to reading and to writing poetry. When she was 14, the scar tissue was removed. She later became valedictorian and was voted most-popular girl, as well as queen of her senior class, but she realized that her traumatic injury had some value: it allowed her to begin "really to see people and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out," as she has said.

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

File:Alice Walker, 1989.jpg
Alice Walker at the Miami Book Fair International of 1989

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

Selected works

Novels and short story collections
Poetry collections
  • Once (1968)
  • Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973)
  • 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)
  • Poem at Thirty-Nine
Non-fiction
  • In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983)
  • Living by the Word (1988)
  • Warrior Marks (1993)
  • The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996)
  • Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism (1997)
  • 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)
  • We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (2006)
  • Mississippi Winter IV
  • Overcoming Speechlessness (2010)

Notes

  1. ^ World Authors 1995-2000, 2003. Retrieved 10 Apr. 2009, from Biography Reference Bank database.
  2. Walker, Alice (May 6, 2010). "Alice Walker". The Tavis Smiley Show. The Smiley Group, Inc.
  3. White, Evelyn C. (2004). Alice Walker: A Life. New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. pp. 14–15.
  4. Gussow, Mel (December 26, 2000). "Once Again, Alice Walker Is Ready to Embrace Her Freedom to Change". The New York Times. section E, p.1.
  5. http://enloehs.wcpss.net/resources/kingsberry/propaganda.pdf
  6. Democracy Now - Walker Interview transcript and audio file on "Inner Light in A time of darkness", accessed 10 February 2010 ]
  7. Democracy Now video on the African American Vote Accessed 10 February 2010
  8. Press release "Notable Women Arrested Protesting Against the War with Iraq" Accessed 12 February 2010
  9. Open Letter to Obama Accessed February 2010
  10. Gaza Freedom March Accessed February 2010
  11. On Finding Your Bliss. Interview by Evelyn C. White October 1998 accessed 14 June 2007
  12. ^ Times article The day feminist icon Alice Walker resigned as my mother
  13. "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)
  14. Daily Mail article by Rebecca Walker: How my mother's fanatical views tore us apart
  15. The Times article The day feminist icon Alice Walker resigned as my mother Accessed February 2010
  16. Guardian Article Friday 15 December 2006 - Interview with Walker No Retreat Accessed May 2010
  17. Extract from Alice Walker, Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism, The Women's Press Ltd, 1997
  18. Walker, Alice. "Everyday Use." Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, Comp. Thomas R. Arp. New York: Harcourt Brace College, 1994, pp. 90-97
  19. Justice, Elaine. "Alice Walker Places Her Archive at Emory" Emory University News, Dec. 18, 2007
  20. 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)

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