Alice Walker

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Pulitzer prize novelist Alice Walker (born 1944) was best known for her stories about black women who achieve heroic stature within the confines of their ordinary day-to-day lives.

Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, to Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah (Grant) Walker. Like many of Walker's fictional characters, she was a sharecropper's daughter and the youngest of eight children. At age eight, Walker was accidentally injured by a BB gun shot to her eye by her brother. Her partial blindness caused her to withdraw and begin writing poetry to ease her loneliness. She found that writing demanded peace and quiet, but these were difficult commodities to come by when ten people lived in four rooms, so she spent a great deal of time working outdoors sitting under a tree.

Walker's Education

Walker attended segregated schools which would be described as inferior by current standards, yet she recalled that she had terrific teachers who encouraged her to believe that the world she was reaching for actually existed. Although Walker grew up in what would traditionally be called a deprived environment, she was sustained by her community and by the knowledge that she could choose her own identity. Moreover, Walker insisted that her mother granted her "permission" to be a writer and gave her the social, spiritual, and moral contexts for her stories. These contexts, as critic Mary Helen Washington explained, were built on personal authority, ancestral presence, "generational continuity, historical awareness, street-wise sophistication [and] cultural integrity."

Upon graduating from high school, Walker secured a scholarship to attend Spelman College in Atlanta, where she got involved in the burgeoning Civil Rights movement. In 1963, Walker received another scholarship and transferred to Sarah Lawrence in New York, where she completed her studies and graduated in 1965 with a B.A. While at Sarah Lawrence, she spent her junior year in Africa as an exchange student. After graduation she worked with the voter registration drive in Georgia and with the Head Start program in Jackson, Mississippi. It was there that she met, and in 1967, married, Melvyn Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer. Their marriage produced one child, Rebecca, before ending in divorce in 1976.

Writing and Teaching Careers Begin

In 1968, Walker published her first collection of poetry, Once. Walker's teaching and writing careers overlapped during the 1970's. She served as a writer-in-residence and as a teacher in the Black Studies program at Jackson State College (1968-1969) and Tougaloo College (1970-1971). While teaching she was at work on her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), which was assisted by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts (1969). She then moved north and taught at Wellesley College and the University of Massachusetts at Boston (both 1972-1973). In 1973 her collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, and a collection of poetry, Revolutionary Petunias, appeared. She received a Radcliffe Institute fellowship (1971-1973), a Rosenthal Foundation award, and an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award (both in 1974) for In Love and Trouble.

In 1976 Walker's second novel, Meridian, was published, followed by a Guggenheim award in 1977-1978. In 1979 another collection of poetry, Goodnight, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning, was published, followed the next year by another collection of short stories, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (1980). Walker's third novel, The Color Purple was published in 1982, and this work won both a Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award the following year. Walker was also a contributor to several periodicals and in 1983 published many of her essays, a collection titled In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: A Collection of Womanist Prose (1983). Walker worked on her fourth novel while living in Mendocino County outside San Francisco.

Walker's Writing Analyzed

At the time of publication of her first novel (1970) Walker said in a Library Journal interview that, for her, "family relationships are sacred." Indeed, much of Walker's work depicted the emotional, spiritual, and physical devastation that occurs when family trust is betrayed. Her focus is on black women, who grow to reside in a larger world and struggle to achieve independent identities beyond male dominion. Although her characters are strong, they are, nevertheless, vulnerable. Their strength resides in their acknowledged debt to their mothers, to their sensuality, and to their friendships among women. These strengths are celebrated in Walker's work, along with the problems women encounter in their relationships with men who regard them as less significant than themselves merely because they are women. The by-product of this belief is, of course, violence. Hence, Walker's stories focus not so much on the racial violence that occurs among strangers but the violence among friends and family members, a kind of deliberate cruelty, unexpected but always predictable.

Walker began her exploration of the terrors that beset black women's lives in her first collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble. Here, she examined the stereotypes about their lives that misshape them and misguide perceptions about them. Her second short story collection, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, dramatizes the resiliency of black women to rebound despite racial, sexual, and economic oppression.

Walker's Novels

Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, centers on the life of a young black girl, Ruth Copeland, and her grandfather, Grange. As an old man, Grange learns that he is free to love, but love does not come without painful responsibility. At the climax of the novel, Grange summons his newly found knowledge to rescue his granddaughter, Ruth, from his brutal son, Brownfield. The rescue demands that Grange murder his son in order to stop the cycle of deliberate cruelty.

Her second novel, Meridian, recounts the life of a civil rights worker, Meridian Hill. Meridian achieves heroic proportions because she refused to blame others for her own shortcomings, becoming a model for those around her.

Walker's third and most famous novel, The Color Purple, is an epistolary novel about Celie, a woman so down and out that she can only tell God her troubles, which she does in the form of letters. Poor, black, female, alone and uneducated, oppressed by caste, class, and gender, Celie learns to lift herself up from sexual exploitation and brutality with the help of the love of another woman, Shug Avery. Against the backdrop of Celie's letters is another story about African customs. This evolves from her sister Nettie's letters which Celie's husband hid from Celie over the course of 20 years. Here, Walker presented problems of women bound within an African context, encountering many of the same problems that Celie faces. Both Celie and Nettie are restored to one another, and, most important, each is restored to herself.

Walker's Works

Walker's other books include Langston Hughes" American Poet (1973). I Love Myself When I'm Laughing …and then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Thurston Reader (1979), which she edited. Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1986). Living By the Word: Selected Writings, 1973-1987 (1988). Finding the Green Stone (1991) with Catherine Deeter (Illustrator). Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965-1990 Complete (1991). Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992). Everyday Use (Women Writers; 1994) with Barbara T. Christian (Editor). The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996). Archbishop Desmond Tutu: An African Prayer Book (1996) with Desmond Tutu. Banned (1996) with an introduction by Patricia Holt. Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writers Activism (1997).

Further Reading

For biographical information see David Bradley, "Novelist Alice Walker: Telling the Black Woman's Story," The New York Times Magazine (January 8, 1984). Gloria Steinem, "Do You Know This Woman? She Knows You: A Profile of Alice Walker," Ms. (June 1982). For critical information see Deb Price, "Alice Through the Looking Glass," The Detroit News (March 1, 1996). David Templeton, "Difficult Honor," Sonoma Independent, (February 15-21, 1996). Barbara Christian, Black Feminist Criticism (1985). Mari Evans, Black Women Writers, 1950-1980 (1983). Claudia Tate, Black Women Writers at Work (1983). For information on the World Wide Web (1997) see "Anniina's Alice Walker Page" at http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/alicew/ and "Alice Walker - Womanist Writer" at http://www.vms.utexas.edu/~melindaj/alice.html

writer; college teacher; poet; publisher

Personal Information

Born Alice Malsenior Walker on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, GA; daughter of Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah (Grant) Walker (sharecroppers); married Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal (a civil rights lawyer), March 17, 1967 (divorced, 1976); children: Rebecca Grant
Education: Attended Spelman College, 1961-63; Sarah Lawrence College, BA, 1965.
Memberships: Board of trustees, Sarah Lawrence College.

Career

Voter registration and Head Start program worker, Mississippi, and with New York City Department of Welfare, mid-1960s; Consultant on black history to Friends of the Children of Mississippi, 1967; teacher, Jackson State College, 1968-69, and Tougaloo College, 1970-71, both Mississippi; lecturer, Wellesley College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1972-73, and University of Massachusetts, Boston, 1972-73; associate professor of English, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, after 1977. Distinguished Writer, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 1982; Fannie Hurst Professor, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, Fall 1982. Lecturer and reader of own poetry at universities and conferences. Member of board of trustees of Sarah Lawrence College.. Co-founder and publisher, Wild Trees Press, Navarro, California, 1984-88. Co-producer of film documentary, Warrior Marks, directed by Pratibha Parmar with script and narration by Walker, 1993.

Life's Work

Recognized as one of the leading voices among black American women writers, Alice Walker has produced an acclaimed and varied body of work, including poetry, novels, short stories, essays, and criticism. Her writings portray the struggle of black people throughout history, and are praised for their insightful and riveting portraits of black life, in particular the experiences of black women in a sexist and racist society. Her most famous work, the award-winning and best-selling novel The Color Purple, chronicles the life of a poor and abused southern black woman who eventually triumph over oppression through affirming female relationships. Walker has described herself as a "womanist"--her term for a black feminist--which she defines in the introduction to her book of essays, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, as one who "appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility ... women's strength" and is "committed to [the] survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female."

A theme throughout Walker's work is the preservation of black culture, and her women characters forge important links to maintain continuity in both personal relationships and communities. According to Barbara T. Christian in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Walker is concerned with "heritage," which to Walker "is not so much the grand sweep of history or artifacts created as it is the relations of people to each other, young to old, parent to child, man to woman." Walker admired the struggle of black women throughout history to maintain an essential spirituality and creativity in their lives, and their achievements serve as an inspiration to others. In Our Mother's Gardens, Walker wrote: "We must fearlessly pull out of ourselves and look at and identify with our lives the living creativity some of our great-grandmothers were not allowed to know. I stress some of them because it is well known that the majority of our great-grandmothers knew, even without 'knowing' it, the reality of their spirituality, even if they didn't recognize it beyond what happened in the singing at church--and they never had any intention of giving it up."

Influenced by Roots

Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in the small rural town of Eatonton, Georgia, where she was the youngest of eight children of impoverished sharecroppers. Both of her parents were storytellers, and Walker was especially influenced by her mother, whom she described in Our Mothers' Gardens as "a walking history of our community." A childhood accident at the age of eight left Walker blind and scarred in one eye, which, partially corrected when she was fourteen, and left a profound influence on her. "I believe ... that it was from this period--from my solitary, lonely position, the position of an outcast--that I began really to see people and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out.... I retreated into solitude, and read stories and began to write poems." Walker has commented that as a southern black growing up in a poor rural community, she possessed the benefit of "double vision." She explained in Our Mothers' Gardens: "Not only is the [black southern writer] in a position to see his own world, and its close community ... but he is capable of knowing, with remarkably silent accuracy, the people who make up the larger world that surrounds and suppresses his own."

Walker was an excellent student, and received a scholarship to Spelman College in Atlanta, and later to Sarah Lawrence College in the Bronx, New York. While in college, she became politically aware in the Civil Rights Movement and participated in many demonstrations. Her first book of poems, Once, was written while she was a senior at Sarah Lawrence and was accepted for publication the same year. Walker wrote many of the poems in the span of a week in the winter of 1965, when she wrestled with suicide after deciding to have an abortion. The poems recount the despair and isolation of her situation, in addition to her experiences in the Civil Rights Movement and of a trip she had made to Africa. Though not widely reviewed, Once marked Walker's debut as a distinctive and talented writer. Carolyn M. Rodgers in Negro Digest noted Walker's "precise wordings, the subtle, unexpected twists ... [and] shifting of emotions." Christian remarked that already in Once, Walker displayed what would become a feature of both her future poetry and fiction, an "unwavering honesty in evoking the forbidden, either in political stances or in love."

Walker returned to the South after college and worked as a voter register in Georgia and an instructor in black history in Mississippi. She recounted in Our Mothers' Gardens that she was inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr.'s message that being a southern black meant "I ... had claim to the land of my birth." Walker continued to write poetry and fiction, and began to further explore the South she came from. She described in Our Mothers' Gardens of being particularly influenced by the Russian writers, who spoke to her of a "soul ... directly rooted in the soil that nourished it." She was also influenced by black writer Zora Neale Hurston, who'd wrote lively folk accounts of the thriving small, southern black community she grew up in. Walker stated in Our Mothers' Gardens how she particularly admired the "racial health" of Hurston's work: "A sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature."

Explored Male Violence and Sexism

Critics have often objected to her portrayal of black males. With the help of a 1967 McDowell fellowship, Walker completed her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, published in 1970. The novel depicts cycles of male violence in three generations of an impoverished southern black family (the Copelands), and displays Walker's interest in social conditions that affect family relationships, in addition to her recurring theme of the suffering of black women at the hands of men. The novel revolves around a father (Grange) who abandons his abused wife and young son (Brownfield) for a more prosperous life in the North, and returns years later to find his son similarly abusing his own family. Christian wrote that the men in the novel are "thwarted by the society in their drive for control of their lives--the American definition of manhood--[and] vent their frustrations by inflicting violence on their wives." Critics praised the realism of the novel, CLA Journal contributor Peter Erickson, who noted that Walker demonstrated "with a vivid matter-of-factness the family's entrapment in a vicious cycle of poverty." However, Walker was also faulted for her portrayal of black men as violent, an aspect which is frequently criticized in her work. Walker responded to such criticism in an interview with Claudia Tate in Black Women Writers at Work: "I know many Brownfields, and it's a shame that I know so many. I will not ignore people like Brownfield. I want you to know I know they exist. I want to tell you about them, and there is no way you are going to avoid them."

Walker frankly depicted the "twin afflictions" of racism and sexism. Walker's women characters display strength, endurance, and resourcefulness in confronting--and overcoming--oppression in their lives, yet Walker is frank in depicting the often devastating circumstances of the "twin afflictions" of racism and sexism. "Black women are called, in the folklore that so aptly identifies one's status in society, 'the mule of the world,' because we have been handed the burdens that everyone else--everyone else--refused to carry," Walker stated in Our Mothers' Gardens. Mary Helen Washington in Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature noted that "the true empathy Alice Walker has for the oppressed woman comes through in all her writings.... Raising an ax, crying out in childbirth or abortion, surrendering to a man who is oblivious to her real name--these are the kinds of images which most often appear in Ms. Walker's own writing." Washington added that the strength of such images is that Walker gives insight into "the intimate reaches of the inner lives of her characters; the landscape of her stories is the spiritual realm where the soul yearns for what it does not have."

Walker's short story collections, In Love and Trouble and You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down expound upon the problems of sexism and racism facing black women. In Love and Trouble features thirteen black women protagonists--many of them from the South--who, as Christian notes, "against their own conscious wills in the face of pain, abuse, even death, challenge the conventions of sex, race, and age that attempt to restrict them." In Our Mothers' Gardens, Walker stated that her intent in the stories was to present a variety of women--"mad, raging, loving, resentful, hateful, strong, ugly, weak, pitiful, and magnificent"--as they "try to live with the loyalty to black men that characterizes all of their lives." Barbara Smith in Ms. praised the collection, stating it "would be an extraordinary literary work if its only virtue were the fact that the author sets out consciously to explore with honesty the textures and terror of black women's lives." Smith added: "The fact that Walker's perceptions, style, and artistry are also consistently high makes her work a treasure."

The stories in You Can't Keep a Good Women Down represented an evolution in subject matter, as Walker delved more directly into mainstream feminist issues such as abortion, pornography, and rape. Although a number of critics remarked that the polemic nature of the stories detracted from their narrative effect, Walker again demonstrated, according to Christian, "the extent to which black women are free to pursue their own selfhood in a society permeated by sexism and racism."

Walker explored similar terrain in her acclaimed 1976 novel, Meridian, in which she recounts the personal evolution of a young black woman against the backdrop of the politics of the Civil Rights Movement. Structurally complex, the novel raised questions of motherhood for the politically-aware female, and the implications for the individual of being committed to revolution. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Marge Piercy praised Meridian as "a fine, taut novel that accomplishes a remarkable amount" and noted that Walker "writes with a sharp critical sense as she deals with the issues of tactics and strategy in the civil rights movement, with the nature of commitment, the possibility of interracial love and communication, the vital and lethal strands in American and black experience, with violence and nonviolence." The novel received much critical recognition and was praised for its deft handling of complex subject matter. Years after its publication, Robert Towers commented in the New York Review of Books that Meridian "remains the most impressive fictional treatment of the 'Movement' that I have yet read."

During this time period, Walker moved to San Francisco in order to escape the world of everyday work as an editor at Ms. magazine. It was here that she rekindled a relationship with Robert Allen, shortly after her divorce from Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal in 1976. She and Allen would move in together in Mendocino, California, and in later years would start a publishing company together called Wild Tree Press.

Struck A Chord With Color Purple

In her 1982 novel, The Color Purple, Walker brought together many of the characters and themes of her previous works in a book which Peter S. Prescott in Newsweek proclaimed "an American novel of permanent importance." The Color Purple is a series of letters written by a southern black woman (Celie), reflecting a history of oppression and abuse suffered at the hands of the men. The book was resoundingly praised for its masterful recreation of black folk speech, in which, as Towers noted, Walker converts Celie's "subliterate dialect into a medium of remarkable expressiveness, color, and poignancy." Towers added: "I find it impossible to imagine Celie apart from her language; through it, not only a memorable and infinitely touching character but a whole submerged world is vividly called into being."

The novel charts Celie's resistance to the oppression surrounding her, and the liberation of her existence through positive and supportive relations with other women. Christian noted that "perhaps even more than Walker's other works, [The Color Purple] especially affirms that the most abused of the abused can transform herself. It completed the cycle Walker announced a decade ago: the survival and liberation of black women through the strength and wisdom of others." The novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award, and was made into a popular motion picture which received several Academy Award nominations.

While The Color Purple garnered much success for Walker, it also brought about a good deal of controversy. Many critics attacked the book as well as the movie adaptation for being "degrading to Black men and promoting lesbianism among Black women," according to Essence. Many people also felt that Walker had degraded the story of The Color Purple when she had allowed Steven Spielberg to adapt the film. According to Essence, many readers of her book felt that she had "'betrayed' Blacks by joining forces with a Jewish male director who epitomized Tinseltown's 'feel-good' cinematic traditions." It took a long time for Walker to respond to this criticism but in 1995 she shot back with The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, a book that was aimed at answering a lot of the criticism of both the book and the movie as well as documenting both the writing and the movie making process that Walker went through. Her hope was that by showing the difficulty in compiling a story such as the The Color Purple, by fleshing out why she wrote the book and certain scenes as she did, as well as explaining exactly how much control she had over the movie version of her story, she would give readers a better understanding of her motivations. The book also included Walker's original screenplay for the movie adaptation that was much truer to the book, another flaw many fans of the book had with the movie.

Flipped Between Critical Opinion and Fiction

During the process of turning The Color Purple into a movie, Walker continued to be prolific. In 1983 she put out In Search of Mother's Garden, her first collection of nonfiction essays that touched on the themes of feminism and the theories of the feminist movement. She returned to poetry in 1984 with Horses Make the Landscape More Beautiful, which again explored the themes of the past, family, and ancestry. Shortly after the release of The Color Purple on movie screens, Walker turned to children's literature with To Hell With Dying which focuses on the mortality of the physical world and how memory conquers this mortality. Many people felt that the book was too heavy handed for a children's book, but many critics saw it as one of the few books that was able to tactfully deal with such an important subject.

Her 1989 novel, The Temple of My Familiar, described by Walker as "a romance of the last 500,000 years," represents a departure of sorts for the author, and critical opinion was mixed upon its publication. J. M. Coetzee in the New York Times Book Review described it as "a mixture of mythic fantasy, revisionary history, exemplary biography and sermon" which is "short on narrative tension, long on inspirational message." In the novel, Walker features six characters, three men and three women, who relate their views on life through recounting memories of ancestors and spirits from past cultures. While a number of reviewers faulted the ideological weight of the novel, others commented that the book remained faithful to the concerns of Walker's works. Luci Tapahonso noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that the novel focused on familiar Walker themes, such as "compassion for the oppressed, the grief of the oppressors, acceptance of the unchangeable and hope for everyone and everything."

While Walker's works speak strongly of the experiences of black women, critics have commented that the messages of her books transcend both race and gender. According to Gloria Steinem in Ms., Walker "comes at universality through the path of an American black woman's experience.... She speaks the female experience more powerfully for being able to pursue it across boundaries of race and class." Jeanne Fox-Alston in the Chicago Tribune Book World called Walker "a provocative writer who writes about blacks in particular, but all humanity in general." In her 1988 prose collection, Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973-1987, Walker discussed, through essays and journal entries, topics such as nuclear weapons and racism in other countries. Noel Perrin in the New York Times Book Review wrote that although Walker's "original interests centered on black women, and especially on the ways they were abused or underrated ... now those interests encompass all creation." Derrick Bell commented in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that Walker "uses carefully crafted images that provide a universality to unique events." Living by the Word presents "vintage Alice Walker: passionate, political, personal, and poetic."

Brought Mutilation Into Consciousness

The early 1990s were a difficult time for Walker, for she ended her 13 year relationship with Robert Allen and contracted Lyme disease. But none of these things stopped her from writing. Shortly before addressing the controversy of The Color Purple in The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, Walker produced another book which brought about much controversy in the critical world, Possessing the Secret of Joy, in 1992. The book focused on Tashi, a young woman living in the fictional African country of Olinka, who is forced by her tribe to take part in the rituals of female circumcision, a process which ruins the rest of Tashi's life. The novel describes graphically the process of female genital mutilation and the repercussions of such actions, including not only physical and psychological problems, but also an inability to keep intact gender. Before the book is finished, Tashi loses all pleasure from sexual encounters, gives birth to a mentally-challenged son, and due to the traumatic nature of the chain of events, is driven to murder the woman who initially circumcised her.

A year later, Walker continued to bring female genital mutilation to the forefront of social consciousness by producing a book and movie called Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blindings of Women. Much like Possessing the Secret of Joy, Warrior Marks, looks at the repercussions of the mutilation traditions in many societies, but instead of fictionalizing the issue as she did in Possessing the Secret of Joy Walker instead decided to work from a documentary standpoint. The film and the book attempted to search out the meanings behind the traditional ceremonies of female genital mutilation and in turn looked for reasons why the tradition was still carried on in modern times.

What impressed many people about both the movie and the book is that it took a complete look at the issue, from both a cultural standpoint as well as a psychological standpoint. Many people were also surprised to learn that Walker was the driving force behind the movie version of Warrior Marks, for she used all of the money that was advanced to her by her publisher Harcourt for the non-fiction documentary book on the subject to produce the movie herself. Walker made it clear in both the movie and the book that her intent with these projects was to make the world-wide public aware that such practices were still going on and according to Publishers Weekly she was "determined to do what she could to rid the world of that barbaric, and often deadly, centuries-year-old tradition."

Turned to Own Life For Inspiration

By the late 1990s Walker had turned to her own experiences in the world for subject matter for her essays and novels. In 1998 she put out a collection of essays entitled Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism which aimed at showing how through writing activism occurred and vice-versa. This idea had begun with Walker during her time making Warrior Marks and carried over into her becoming more socially and politically active on subjects such as the treatment of women in Ghana, the defense of Winnie Mandela, and the role of parents in the lives of children.

In 1999 Walker released By the Light of My Father's Smile, a novel that examines how a person's sexuality can influence the way in which people respond to them. This was an issue that Walker dealt with directly in her own life when she made it publicly known that she was homosexual in the mid-1990s. By the Light of My Father's Smile is also concerned with the idea of cultural diversity and spirituality, with the ghost of the father of the main character, Magdalena, unable to rest in the afterworld until he is able to accept the love between his daughter and a person of a mixed heritage.

In an attempt to chronicle many of the events of her life, Walker turned to the essay filled The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart. In this book Walker examined her early marriage to a white man as well as, according to Black Issues Book Review, exploring the "complexity of love and race and family ... the contradictory nexus of sexual response and sexual responsibility and worries about past loves, unfamiliar therapists and weeping children." In a response to this book, Walker's daughter Rebecca wrote Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, which revealed a very different side to Walker's personal life, about how she often treated her daughter poorly and how she was often selfish in her pursuit of her writing. Walker has taken a good deal of criticism since the release of Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, but in response she told Black Issues Book Review, "In general, I don't seem to care very much about what people think ... I'm pretty clear about what I'm supposed to be doing here, and I do that."

In 2003 Walker returned to poetry, a medium she had not used since the mid-1980s, with her book Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth. Written in response to events such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the poems in the book focus on healing the spirit through experience and age in a world that is attempting to kill freedom. She told Black Issues Book Review, "I think that with time, we begin to understand a little better that some things we thought were horrible, unbearable ... can be bearable as we grow older. For instance, in my early poetry ... I wrote poems about suicide. And now I don't think about that very much. It's interesting because I think that to wage continuous war in the world is a kind of suicide. In a sense, the suicide that I see now is a global one. It's humanity that seems to be interested in ending itself. But I don't feel interested in ending myself. I think that's progress."

Walker continues to make the public aware of views, not only in media, but in her actions as well. In March of 2003 she joined with Maxine Hong Kingston and a group known as CodePink to protest the United States military action in Iraq and was arrested for demonstrating in a closed area in front of the White House and crossing police lines. Many critics have wondered whether the writer will ever slow down, but she told Black Issues Book Review, "I think all I can say is that now I'm an older person. I'm someone who has had much more experience than in the beginning. Bit in some ways, I'm concerned about the same issues, the same emotions. I'm concerned with the safety of our people, the planet, people who are in deep trouble around the world."

In 2004, Walker published another novel, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart. The novel is a memorial to her paternal grandmother, who was murdered when Walker's father was a boy. Her novel's protagonist is named Kate Nelson, after her grandmother. The 57-year-old Nelson, who changes her name to Talkingtree, embarks on a physical and spiritual adventure, rafting down the Colorado river and then through the Amazonian rain forest. In Black Issues Book Review, Susan McHenry praised Walker's "embrace of the vagaries of human nature, her gentle, self-deprecating humor and profound philosophical insights."

In 2005, Walker's novel The Color Purple was adapted as a musical with a libretto by Marsha Norman and music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray. The play will open at the Broadway Theater in New York on December 1, 2005.

Awards

Selected: Bread Loaf Writer's Conference scholar, 1966; first prize, American Scholar essay contest, 1967; Merrill writing fellowship, 1967; McDowell Colony fellowship, 1967, 1977-78; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1969, 1977; Radcliffe Institute fellowship, 1971-73; Ph.D., Russell Sage College, 1972; National Book Award nomination and Lillian Smith Award from the Southern Regional Council, both 1973, both for Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems; Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1974, for In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women; Guggenheim fellowship, 1977-78; National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, 1982, and Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award, both 1983, all for The Color Purple; Best Books for Young Adults citation, American Library Association, 1984, for In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose; D.H.L., University of Massachusetts, 1983; O. Henry Award, 1986, for "Kindred Spirits"; Langston Hughes Award, New York City College, 1989; Nora Astorga Leadership award, 1989; Fred Cody award for lifetime achievement, Bay Area Book Reviewers Association, 1990; Freedom to Write award, PEN West, 1990; California Governor's Arts Award, 1994; Literary Ambassador Award, University of Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers, 1998.

Works

Selected works

Fiction

• The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Harcourt, 1970.
• In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, Harcourt, 1973.
• Meridian, Harcourt, 1976.
• You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Harcourt, 1981.
• The Color Purple, Harcourt, 1982.
• To Hell with Dying, Harcourt, 1988.
• The Temple of My Familiar, Harcourt, 1989.
• Possessing the Secret of Joy, Harcourt, 1992.
• By the Light of My Father's Smile, Random House, 1998.
• Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, Random House, 2004.

Nonfiction

• Langston Hughes: American Biography (for children), Crowell, 1973.
• (Editor) I Love Myself When I'm Laughing ... and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, Feminist Press, 1979.
• In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, Harcourt, 1983.
• Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973-1987, Harcourt, 1988.
• Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women, Harcourt, 1993.
• The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, Scribner, 1996.
• Banned, Aunt Lute Books, 1996.
• Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism, Random House, 1997.
• The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart, Random House, 2000.
• Sent By Earth: A Message From the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center, Seven Stories Press, 2001.

Poetry

• Once: Poems, Harcourt, 1968.
• Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, Harcourt, 1973.
• Goodnight, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning, Dial, 1979.
• Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, Harcourt, 1984.
• Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems, Harcourt, 1991.
• Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth: New Poems, Random House, 2003.

Other

• Contributor to numerous books, anthologies, and periodicals; contributing editor to periodicals, including Freedomways and Ms. Media adaptations--The Color Purple was made into a film and released by Warner Bros. in 1985.

Further Reading

Books

• Bell, Roseann P., Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, editors, Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, Anchor Press, 1979.
• Bestsellers 89, Issue 4, Gale, 1989.
• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Volume 27 (entry contains interview), Gale, 1989.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 5, 1976; Volume 6, 1976; Volume 9, 1978; Volume 19, 1981; Volume 27, 1984; Volume 46, 1988.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 6: "American Novelists since World War II," 2nd series, Gale, 1980; Volume 33: "Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955," Gale, 1984.
• Evans, Mari, editor, Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984.

Periodicals

• Biblio, January 1999, p. 61.
• Black Issues Book Review, November 2000, p. 17; March-April 2003, pp. 34-38; May-June 2004, p. 44.
• Chicago Tribune Book World, August 1, 1982; September 15, 1985.
• CLA Journal, September 1979.
• Essence, February 1996, pp. 84-88.
• Lancet, February 13, 1993, p. 423.
• Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 29, 1988; May 21, 1989.
• Ms., February 1974; June 1982.
• Negro Digest, September/October 1968.
• Newsweek, June 21, 1982.
• New York Review of Books, August 12, 1982.
• New York Times Book Review, May 26, 1976; June 5, 1988; April 30, 1989.
• People,May 3, 2004, p. 45.
• Publishers Weekly, October 25, 1993, p. 13; December 18, 1995, p. 38; July 6, 1998, p. 47; September 11, 2000, p. 71.
• Variety, October 3, 2005, p. 70.
• Writer, September 2003, p. 10.

On-line

• Book www.bookmagazine.com (October 24, 2003).
• "Walker's Complete Works," Living By Grace, http://members.tripod.com/chrisdanielle/completeworks.html (October 24, 2003).

— Michael E. Mueller and Ralph G. Zerbonia

Walker, Alice, 1944-, African-American novelist and poet, b. Eatonon, Ga. The daughter of sharecroppers, she studied at Spelman College (1961-63) and Sarah Lawrence College (B.A., 1965). She brings her travel experience in Africa and memories of the American civil-rights movement to an examination of the experience of African Americans, mainly in the South, and of Africans. A self-described "womanist," she has maintained a strong focus on feminist issues within African-American culture. Walker won wide recognition with her novel The Color Purple (1982; Pulitzer Prize; film, 1985), a dark but sometimes joyous saga of a poor black Southern woman's painful journey toward self-realization. Among her other novels are Meridian (1976), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), By the Light of My Father's Smile (1994), and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004). Her short-story collections include You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (1981) and the partially autobiographical The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000). She has also written poetry, such as Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973), Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965-1990 (1991), and Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003). Many of her essays are collected in Living by the Word (1988) and Anything We Love Can Be Saved (1997).

Bibliography

See biography by E. C. White (2004); studies by D. W. Winchell (1992), H. L. Gates et al., ed. (1993), and Ikenna Dieke, ed. (1999).

(b. 1944)

1970	The Third Life of Grange Copeland. Having previously published a collection of poems, Once (1968), Walker produces her first novel, a realistic family saga detailing struggles against racial, class, and gender obstacles. It is noteworthy for examining the African American experience in a broad psychological, moral, and sexual context. Born in Georgia, Walker was educated at Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence.
1973	In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. Walker's collection wins the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award. She also publishes her third book of poetry, Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, as well as two children's books, Langston Hughes, American Poet and The Life of Thomas Hodge.
1976	Meridian. Walker's second novel concerns a black woman and civil rights activist who returns to her Southern home to deal with the gap between her political ideals and the realities she finds. The work establishes one of Walker's dominant themes: the racism and sexism experienced by black women.
1981	You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down. Walker's second story collection treats a number of issues raised by feminists in the 1970s, including abortion, pornography, and rape.
1982	The Color Purple. Walker's novel concerns the oppression of a black woman by both white and black society. The book violates many taboos with its considerations of black-on-black violence, incest, and lesbian love. A bestseller, it earns Walker both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. In 1988, the novel would be adapted for the screen by director Stephen Spielberg.
1983	In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. Regarded as an important feminist critic of both African American and white American male writers, Walker discusses the important influences on her and on the women and men she believes should be included in her womanist perspective. Walker's criticism is distinctive, combining literary analysis with an autobiographical and narrative structure.
1984	Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful. Walker's collection deals with racial oppression and personal fulfillment in poems such as "Well," "Family Of," "Killers," and "The Dreams of Liz's Bosom."
1989	The Temple of My Familiar. Walker's ambitious panoramic novel traces 500,000 years of human history and sexism through the various incarnations of Miss Lissie, an African goddess.
1992	Possessing the Secret of Joy. Walker revisits the character of Tashi from The Color Purple in this novel dealing with the African ritual of genital mutilation, a topic Walker would return to in the nonfiction book Warrior Marks (1994).
1998	By the Light of My Father's Smile. Walker's novel describes a family's move to the remote sierras of Mexico amid a band of mixed-race blacks and Indians. Walker describes her book as "a celebration of sexuality, its absolute usefulness in the accessing of one's mature spirituality, and the father's role in assuring joy or sorrow in this arena for his female children."

Quotes:

"The original crime of niggers and lesbians is that they prefer themselves."

"Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home."

"Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise."

"It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all."

"For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged."

"No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow."

See more famous quotes by Alice Walker

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