Alice Malsenior Walker

Alice Malsenior Walker
February 9, 1944
Novelist, short story writer, poet, political activist
The first African American Woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature fiction
Co-founder of Wild Tree Press
The originator of the term phrase “womanism”
Alice is an award-winning American literary fiction novelist, short story writer, poet, and activist. She wrote the novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She also wrote the novels Meridian (1976) and The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), among other works. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 and the National Book Award the same year.

She is an American writer whose novels, short stories, and poems are noted for their insightful treatment of African American culture. Her novels, most notably The Color Purple (1982), focus particularly on women.

Alice was the last of eight children of Minnie Lou Grant Walker and Willie Lee Walker; precocious, outgoing, and adored by all, she by all accounts enjoyed a happy early childhood. Despite poverty, discrimination in the face of Jim Crow laws, and threats from the Ku Klux Klan, the Walkers saw to it that their children attended school. Her father worked as a sharecropper on a white-owned farm. Braving the Klan, he was the first black man in their county to vote. Her mother worked in the cotton fields and later as a maid. Walker remembers her as the source of her own strong sense of purpose.

Walker was the eighth child of African American sharecroppers. While growing up she was accidentally blinded in one eye, and her mother gave her a typewriter, allowing her to write instead of doing chores. She received a scholarship to attend Spelman College, where she studied for two years before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College. After graduating in 1965, Walker moved to Mississippi and became involved in the civil rights movement. She also began teaching and publishing short stories and essays. She married in 1967, but the couple divorced in 1979.

Her mother also imbued her with an appreciation of beauty; in the seminal 1974 essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” Walker paid tribute to her mother’s aesthetic and practical gifts and opened a new perspective for honoring African American women’s long ignored accomplishments in such activities as gardening, quilt-making and story-telling. The stories Alice heard about earlier generations in her family left their mark and became the inspiration for her later fiction; in particular, she felt she had honored her Georgia “ancestors” and their struggles in the characters and events of The Color Purple.

When Alice was eight, she was accidentally injured while playing with two of her brothers; the shot from a BB gun left her blind in one eye and physically and emotionally scarred. Feeling no longer lovely or loveable, she retreated into a world of books and introspection which she later claimed enhanced her empathy with the suffering of others as well as her observational powers. For six years, she suffered the shame and guilt of feeling an outsider. At 14 she was given an operation which removed the cataract in her eye and restored her appearance and sense of self-esteem.

Alice graduated from high school in 1961 as class valedictorian and prom queen and received a scholarship to attend Spelman College in Atlanta, one of the first historic black women’s colleges in the US. Here she became active in the civil rights movement, attending the 1963 March on Washington, and studied with such influential radical historians as Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynd. She grew impatient with the restrictions at Spelman, however, which at the time saw its mission as turning “black girls into refined ladies and teachers.” (Edelman)

With the help of Lynd’s mother, Walker received a scholarship to the élite Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Mentored by teachers and poets Jane Cooper and Muriel Rukeyser, Alice devoted herself to becoming a writer; her early efforts “bowled over” the entire writing faculty.

A summer spent in Kenya and Uganda exposed Walker to the ravages of colonialism and disillusioned somewhat her enthusiasm for the African independence movements of the 50s and early 60s. An unintended pregnancy brought her near to suicide; when she miraculously was able to obtain an illegal abortion, she produced a flood of poetry that (through Rukeyser’s efforts) later became her first book publication, Once (1968). After graduating with honors from Sarah Lawrence Walker worked briefly for the welfare office in New York City, but soon realized that it left her little time for writing. She accepted a summer job in Mississippi with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, working to establish the civil rights of poor blacks in the deepest of the segregationist South.

Here she met and fell in love with her co-worker, the young Jewish civil rights lawyer Melvyn Leventhal. They married in 1967 despite the sharp disapproval of his mother and the fears of her family and their friends for their safety – in Mississippi “miscegenation” was condemned and biracial marriage illegal. Daughter Rebecca was born in 1969. Alice Walker often felt overwhelmed trying to combine motherhood with writing and teaching (she held positions at Jackson State, Tougalou College, and later at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Wellesley College and Brandeis University): “I was afraid I could not be a successful writer and a mother at the same time.

Walker’s first book of poetry, Once, appeared in 1968, and her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), a narrative that spans 60 years and three generations, followed two years later. A second volume of poetry, Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, and her first collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Woman, both appeared in 1973. The latter bears witness to sexist violence and abuse in the African American community. After moving to New York, Walker completed Meridian (1976), a novel describing the coming of age of several civil rights workers in the 1960s.

Walker’s introduction of the concept of “womanism” (1983) was an influential corrective to the focus on white women understood by many under the term “feminism;” it helped broaden the women’s movement to include women of color and appreciate their traditional cultural and creative roles. “Womanism is to feminism as purple is to lilac.” (Walker, 1983). Walker has also been instrumental in rediscovering and promoting other Black women writers, past and present, most notably Zora Neale Hurston (1901-1960), whose work she edited and interpreted.

Walker later moved to California, where she wrote her most popular novel, The Color Purple (1982). An epistolary novel, it depicts the growing up and self-realization of an African American woman between 1909 and 1947 in a town in Georgia. The book won a Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg in 1985. A musical version produced by Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones premiered in 2004.

alker’s later fiction includes The Temple of My Familiar, an ambitious examination of racial and sexual tensions (1989); Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), a narrative centred on female genital mutilation; By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998), the story of a family of anthropologists posing as missionaries in order to gain access to a Mexican tribe; and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2005), about an older woman’s quest for identity. Reviewers complained that these novels employed New Age abstractions and poorly conceived characters, though Walker continued to draw praise for championing racial and gender equality in her work. She also released the volume of short stories The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000) and several other volumes of poetry, including Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003), A Poem Traveled Down My Arm (2003), Hard Times Require Furious Dancing (2010), and Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart (2018). Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems (1991) collects poetry from 1965 to 1990.
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Walker’s essays were compiled in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), 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), and The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm’s Way (2013). Walker also wrote juvenile fiction and critical essays on such female writers as Flannery O’Connor and Zora Neale Hurston. She cofounded a short-lived press in 1984. Throughout her career Walker occasionally attracted criticism. Notably, some African Americans strongly objected to the perceived negative portrayal of Black men in The Color Purple. In later years Walker, who often spoke out against Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, was accused of being anti-Semitic, with her support of a Holocaust denier drawing particular attention.

In the unconventional memoir The Chicken Chronicles (2011), Walker discussed caring for a flock of chickens while also musing on her life. Gathering Blossoms Under Fire (2022) is a collection of her journals. The documentary Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth was released in 2013.

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