Alice Walker was born on
February 9, 1944, in the small rural town
of Eatonton, Georgia. She was the eighth and last child of Willie
Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant, two sharecroppers. Walker’s
parents’ experiences with the oppressive sharecropping system and
the racism of the American South deeply influenced Walker’s writing and
life’s work. When Walker was eight, one of her brothers accidentally
shot her, permanently blinding her in one eye. Ashamed of her facial
disfigurement, Walker isolated herself from other children, reading
and writing to pass the time.
In 1961, on a scholarship for
disabled students, Walker enrolled in Spelman College in Atlanta,
where she became active in the A-frican-American civil rights movement.
Two years later, Walker transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in
New York and eventually traveled to Uganda as an exchange student.
When she returned for her senior year, Walker was shocked to learn
that she was pregnant, and, afraid of her parents’ reaction, she
considered suicide. However, a classmate helped Walker obtain a
safe abortion, and she graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1965.
At this time, Walker composed two early landmark pieces: “To Hell
with Dying,” her first published short story, and Once:
Poems, her first volume of poetry.
Walker continued her involvement with the civil rights
movement after graduation, working as a volunteer on black voter
registration drives in Georgia and Mississippi in 1965 and 1966.
In 1967, Walker married Melvyn Leventhal,
a Jewish civil rights lawyer, with whom she had one daughter before
the two divorced in the mid-1970s. Walker’s
second novel, Meridian, explored the controversial
issue of sexism in the civil rights movement.
In 1982, Walker published her
most famous novel, The Color Purple. For the novel,
which chronicles the struggle of several black women in rural Georgia
in the first half of the twentieth century, Walker won the Pulitzer
Prize and the American Book Award. In 1985,
a Steven Spielberg film based on the novel was released to wide
audiences and significant acclaim.
Upon its publication, The Color
Purple unleashed a storm of controversy. It instigated
heated debates about black cultural representation, as a number
of male African-American critics complained that the novel reaffirmed
old racist stereotypes about pathology in black communities and
of black men in particular. Critics also charged Walker with focusing
heavily on sexism at the expense of addressing notions of racism
in America. Nonetheless, The Color Purple also
had its ardent supporters, especially among black women and others
who praised the novel as a feminist fable. The heated disputes surrounding The
Color Purple are a testimony to the resounding effects
the work has had on cultural and racial discourse in the United
States.
Walker’s 1992 novel, Possessing
the Secret of Joy, concerns the marriage of Adam and Tashi—two
characters who make their first appearance in The Color
Purple—and the consequences of Tashi’s decision to undergo
the traditional African ritual of female circumcision. Walker has
continued to explore the unique problems that face black women in
both in the United States and Africa. Her novels, poetry, essays,
and criticism have become an important part in a burgeoning tradition
of talented black women writers.
