Alice Walker

Alice Walker is an African-American novelist and poet; born in Eatonton, Ga. Her parents, Minnie Lou Grant and Willie Lee Walker, were both sharecroppers. Blinded in one eye from an accidental gunshot wound at the young age of eight, Walker fell into somewhat of a depression. She secluded herself from the other children , and as she explains, "I no longer felt like the little girl I was. I felt old, and because I felt I was unpleasant to look at, filled with shame. I retreated into solitude, and read stories and began to write poems."

Walker later won a Spelman College scholarship for disabled students. Her involvement in various civil rights demonstrations led to her dismissal. She then won another scholarship at the progressive Sarah Lawrence College. In 1964 she travelled to Uganda, Africa where she studied as an exchange student. Upon her return in 1965, she received her B.A. degree.. She was then awarded a writing fellowship and was planning to spend it in Senegal, West Africa. Her plans changed, however, after working as a case worker in the New York City welfare department. She, instead, decided to volunteer her time working at the voter registration drive in Mississippi in the summer of 1966, later claiming that her decision had been based on "the realization that I could never live happily in Africa-or anywhere else-until I could live freely in Mississippi"

In 1967, Walker married Mel Leventhal, a white activist civil rights lawyer, and one year later Walker gave birth to their daughter Rebecca. It was not until she began teaching that her writing career began to take off. She started at Jackson State, then Tougaloo, and finally at Wellesley College. She was also a fellow at the Ratcliffe Institute from 1971 to 1973 . In her last year there she published her first collection of stories, In Love & Trouble.

She uses her travel experience in Africa as well as her memories of the Civil Rights movement in an examination of the experiences of African Americans in the South. She was also influenced by a number of other prominant authors, including Flannery O'Conner and Zora Neale Hurston.

In 1974, Alice Walker became the fiction editor of Ms.magazine and moved to Japantown in San Francisco four years later where she still lives today.

Her most important novel is The Color Purple, which was praised for its strong characterizations and the clear, musical quality of its colloquial language. With this novel she became widely known, and the proof of it is the National Book Award in 1983 for the category of fiction, and in the same year she received the Pulitzer Prize, also under fiction. Three years later, in 1985, the The Color Purple was made into the major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg.

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