Alice walker biography facts

Northwestern University Press. Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Archived from the original on December 17, Retrieved January 26, Retrieved October 28, Rowling Redacted. Rowling's TERF views in new essay". Retrieved May 25, Rowling's Trans Exclusionary Views". Madame Noire. Retrieved March 30, Beloved young trans people.

Alice Walker's Garden. The Independent on Sunday. Archived from the original on May 20, Retrieved April 2, The Washington Informer. Retrieved October 13, June 18, Alice Walker: The Official Website. Retrieved December 17, Retrieved July 3, The Washington Post. April 24, The Jewish Chronicle. The Root. December 22, Retrieved December 24, The Jerusalem Post Jpost.

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Archived from the original on December 3, Retrieved May 26, Rolling Stone. Retrieved January 25, October 15, About Tracy Chapman. MultiCultural Review. Circling Faith: Southern women on spirituality. University of Alabama Press. Modern Language Studies. JSTOR Interviews with Black Writers 1st ed. New York: Liveright. Barbara Smith interviewed by Loretta L.

Ross , May 7—8, , p. Studies in Short Fiction. Gale: — African American Review. National Coalition of Black Women. Archived from the original on March 14, Past winners and finalists by category. Retrieved March 17, New Georgia Encyclopedia. February 1, Retrieved February 2, Further reading [ edit ]. External links [ edit ]. 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 other books include Langston Hughes " American Poet Living By the Word: Selected Writings, Possessing the Secret of Joy Christian Editor. Banned with an introduction by Patricia Holt. June Barbara Christian, Black Feminist Criticism Mari Evans, Black Women Writers, Pulitzer Prize -winning novelist Alice Walker is best known for her stories about African American women who achieve heroic stature within the borders of their ordinary day-to-day lives.

Like many of Walker's fictional characters, she was the daughter of a sharecropper a farmer who rents his land , and the youngest of eight children. Her partial blindness caused her to withdraw from normal childhood activities and begin writing poetry to ease her loneliness. She found that writing demanded peace and quiet, but these were difficult things to come by when ten people lived in four rooms.

She spent a great deal of time working outdoors sitting under a tree. Walker attended segregated separated by race schools which would be described as inferior by current standards, yet she recalled that she had terrific teachers who encouraged her to believe the world she was reaching for actually existed. Although Walker grew up in a poor environment, she was supported 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 substance for her stories. Upon graduating from high school, Walker secured a scholarship to attend Spelman College in Atlanta , Georgia, where she got involved in the growing Civil Rights movement, a movement which called for equal rights among all races.

In , Walker received another scholarship and transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York , where she completed her studies and graduated in with a bachelor's degree. After graduation she worked with a voter registration drive in Georgia and the Head Start program a program to educate poorer children in Jackson, Mississippi. It was there she met, and in married, Melvyn Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer.

Walker's teaching and writing careers overlapped during the s. She served as a writer-in-residence and as a teacher in the Black Studies program at Jackson State College in Tennessee — 69 and Tougaloo College in Mississippi — While teaching she was at work on her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland , which was assisted by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts ; a government program to provide money to artists.

She then moved north and taught at Wellesley College, in Massachusetts, and the University of Massachusetts at Boston both — In Walker's second novel, Meridian, was published, followed by a Guggenheim award in — Walker worked on her fourth novel while living in Mendocino County outside San Francisco , California. The rescue demands that Grange murder his son in order to stop the cycle of cruelty.

Walker's third and most famous novel, The Color Purple, is 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, held down by 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.

This evolves from her sister Nettie's letters which Celie's husband hid from Celie over the course of twenty years. At the time of publication of Walker's first novel in , she said in a Library Journal interview that, for her, "family relationships are sacred. Her focus is on African American women, who live in a larger world and struggle to achieve independent identities beyond male domination.

What comes out 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 African American 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 strength of African American women to rebound despite racial, sexual, and economic difficulties. Bloom, Harold, ed. Alice Walker. New York : Chelsea House, Gentry, Tony.

New York : Chelsea, The vision in Walker's right eye was destroyed when she was eight years old by a brother's BB gun shot, an event that caused her to become an introverted child. Six years later Walker's self-confidence and commitment to school increased dramatically after a minor surgical procedure removed disfiguring scar tissue from around her injured eye.

Encouraged by her family and community, Walker won a scholarship for the handicapped and matriculated at Spelman College in After two years Walker transferred to Sarah Lawrence College because she felt that Spelman stifled the intellectual growth and maturation of its students, an issue she explores in the novel Meridian. At Sarah Lawrence, Walker studied works by European and white American writers, but the school failed to provide her with an opportunity to explore the intellectual and cultural traditions of black people.

Walker sought to broaden her education by traveling to Africa during the summer before her senior year. During her stay there Walker became pregnant, and the urgency of her desire to terminate the pregnancy she was prepared to commit suicide had she not been able to get an abortion , along with her experiences in Africa and as a participant in the civil rights movement, became the subject of her first book, a collection of poems entitled Once Walker moved to Mississippi in , where she taught, worked with Head Start programs, and helped to register voters.

There she met and married Melvyn Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer whom she subsequently divorced a daughter, Rebecca, was born in , and wrote her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland , a chilling exploration of the causes and consequences of black intrafamilial violence. In Hurston, Walker discovered a figure who had been virtually erased from American literary history in large part because she held views — on the beauty and complexity of black southern rural culture; on the necessity of what Walker termed a "womanist" critique of sexism; and on racism and sexism as intersecting forms of oppression — for which she had herself been condemned.

In Hurston, Walker found legitimacy for her own literary project. Walker obtained a tombstone for Hurston's grave, which proclaimed her "A Genius of the South ," and focused public attention on her neglected work, including the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. In her influential essay "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" Walker asked, with Hurston and other marginalized women in mind, "How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century?

By acknowledging her artistic debt to such writers as Phillis Wheatley , Virginia Woolf, and Hurston, as well as to her own verbally and horticulturally adept mother, Walker encouraged a generation of readers and scholars to question traditional evaluative norms. In all these works, she examined the racial and gendered inequities that affect black Americans generally and black women in particular.

The most celebrated and controversial of these works is her Pulitzer Prize — and National Book Award — winning epistolary novel, The Color Purple , which explores, among other matters, incest, marital violence, lesbianism, alternative religious practices, and black attitudes about gender. Walker continues to add to an acclaimed and varied body of work that challenges and inspires its readers, including a volume of new poetry, Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth , and her novel Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart In Walker was arrested, along with other members of a group called CodePink, while protesting the war in Iraq.

Awkward, Michael. New York : Columbia University Press, Philadelphia: Chelsea House, White, Evelyn C. Alice Walker: A Life. New York : Norton, Awkward, Michael " Walker, Alice. Awkward, Michael "Walker, Alice. American novelist, short story writer, essayist, poet, critic, editor, and author of children's books. Walker, Alice — gale.

Learn more about citation styles Citation styles Encyclopedia. Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, Harcourt, Meridian novel , Harcourt, The Color Purple novel , Harcourt, To Hell with Dying juvenile story , Harcourt, The Temple of My Familiar novel , Harcourt, Sources Books Bell, Roseann P. Bestsellers 89, Issue 4, Gale, CLA Journal, September Newsweek, June 21, New York Review of Books, August 12, Contemporary Black Biography Mueller, Michael.

Walker, Alice gale. Leventhal, divorced ; children: Rebecca Alice Walker is the eighth child of black sharecroppers. Bibliography: Bell, R. Reference works: African American Writers Other references: American Scholar Winter Walker, Alice Malsenior gale. The Color Purple. Possessing the Secret of Joy. By the Light of My Father's Smile.

New York, Random House, Poetry Once. Other for children Langston Hughes , American Poet biography.

Alice walker biography facts

To Hell with Dying. New York, RandomHouse, Alice Malsenior Walker gale. Alice Malsenior Walker Pulitzer prize novelist Alice Walker born was best known for her stories about black women who achieve heroic stature within the confines of their ordinary day-to-day lives. 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.

Walker's Writing Analyzed At the time of publication of her first novel Walker said in a Library Journal interview that, for her, "family relationships are sacred. Alice Walker Born: February 9, Eatonton, Georgia African American novelist Pulitzer Prize -winning novelist Alice Walker is best known for her stories about African American women who achieve heroic stature within the borders of their ordinary day-to-day lives.

Writing and teaching careers begin In , Walker published her first collection of poetry, Once. The couple had a daughter before divorcing in Walker published her first book of poetry, Once and first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland to much acclaim. In , Walker alongside scholar Charlotte D. Hunt discovered the unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston in Ft.

Pierce, Florida, and had it marked. In , she released The Chicken Chronicles ; in this latest memoir, she ruminates on caring for her flock of chickens. According to Walker's website, her books have been translated into more than two dozen languages and sold more than 15 million copies. Following their marriage in , they became the first legally married interracial couple to live in Mississippi.

The two had one daughter, Rebecca, before divorcing in Walker later dated both men and women, including singer Tracy Chapman. She was also known for publicly feuding with her daughter, who described how she was neglected by her writer mom in her memoir Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self In , Walker's personal papers were made available to the public at Emory University in Georgia.

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