Biography
Novelist, poet and feminist. Born Alice Malsenior Walker, born in Eatonton, Georgia the 9th of February of 1944, Walker is one of the most important and admired African American writers working today. Walker, was the youngest of eight children to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Talluah Grant. Her father was a sharecropper and a dairy farmer and her mother supplemented the family income by workind as a maid. She worked to pay for Alice to attend college. Walker's parents resisted landlords who expected the children of black sharecroppers to work the fields at a young age. A white plantation owner said to her that black people had “no need for education.” Minnie Lou Walker said, "You might have some black children somewhere, but they don’t live in this house. Don’t you ever come around here again talking about how my children don’t need to learn how to read and write.” Her mother enrolled Alice in first grade at the age of four. Walker grew up with an oral tradition, listening to stories from her grandparent(who was the model for the character of Mr. in The Color Purple) she began to write very privately.
When she was eight years old. "With my family, I had to hide things," she said. "And I had to keep a lot in my mind. Walker was accidentally wounded in the right eye by a gun fired by one of her brothers. The Walkers could not take their daughter to a hospital for immediate treatment. By the time they reached a doctor a week later, she had become permanently blind in that eye. When a layer of scar tissue formed over her wounded eye, Alice became self-conscious and painfully shy. Stared at and sometimes taunted, she felt like an outcast and turned for solace to reading and to writing poetry. She later became valedictorian and was voted most-popular girl, as well as queen of her senior class, but she realized that her traumatic injury had some value: it allowed her to begin "really to see people and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out."
After high school, Walker went to Spelman College in Atlanta on a full scholarship in 1961 and later transferred to Sarah Laurence College near New York City, graduating in 1965. In this same year, Walker met Melvyn Roseman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. They go married on March 17, 1967 in New York City. Later that year, the couple moved to Jackson, Mississippi were they became the first legally married inter-racial couple in Mississippi. They were harrassed and threatened by whites, including the Ku Klux Klan. The couple had a daughter named Rebecca and Walker described her as "a living, breathing, mixed-race embodiment of the new America that they were trying to forge."
Walker's first book of poetry was written while she was a senior at high school. While working in the civil rights movements, shee took a rest from writing but she resumed her writing career when she joined Ms. magazine as an aditor before moving to California in the late 1970s. In addition to her collected short stories and poetry, Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, was published in 1970. In 1976, Walker's second novel,Meridian, was published. The novel dealt with activist workers in the South during the civil rights movement, and closely paralleled some of Walker's own experiences. In 1982, Walker published what has become her best-known work, the novel The Color Purple which is about a young troubled black woman fighting her way through not only racist white culture but also patriarchal black culture, it was a resounding commercial success. The book became a bestseller and was subsequently adapted into a critically acclaimed 1885 movie as well as a 2005 Broadway musical. She has published a number of collections of short stories, poetry, and other published work. She expresses the struggles of black people, particularly women, and their lives in a racist, sexist, and violent society. Her writings also focus on the role of women of color in culture and history. Walker is a respected figure in the liberal political community for her support of unconventional and unpopular views as a matter of principle.
In 2007, Walker gave her papers, 122 boxes of manuscripts and archive material, to Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. In addition to drafts of novels such as The Color Purple, unpublished poems and manuscripts, and correspondence with editors, the collection includes extensive correspondence with family members, friends and colleagues, an early treatment of the film script for The Color Purple, syllabi from courses she taught, and fan mail. The collection also contains a scrapbook of poetry compiled when Walker was 15, entitled "Poems of a Childhood Poetess".
When she was eight years old. "With my family, I had to hide things," she said. "And I had to keep a lot in my mind. Walker was accidentally wounded in the right eye by a gun fired by one of her brothers. The Walkers could not take their daughter to a hospital for immediate treatment. By the time they reached a doctor a week later, she had become permanently blind in that eye. When a layer of scar tissue formed over her wounded eye, Alice became self-conscious and painfully shy. Stared at and sometimes taunted, she felt like an outcast and turned for solace to reading and to writing poetry. She later became valedictorian and was voted most-popular girl, as well as queen of her senior class, but she realized that her traumatic injury had some value: it allowed her to begin "really to see people and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out."
After high school, Walker went to Spelman College in Atlanta on a full scholarship in 1961 and later transferred to Sarah Laurence College near New York City, graduating in 1965. In this same year, Walker met Melvyn Roseman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. They go married on March 17, 1967 in New York City. Later that year, the couple moved to Jackson, Mississippi were they became the first legally married inter-racial couple in Mississippi. They were harrassed and threatened by whites, including the Ku Klux Klan. The couple had a daughter named Rebecca and Walker described her as "a living, breathing, mixed-race embodiment of the new America that they were trying to forge."
Walker's first book of poetry was written while she was a senior at high school. While working in the civil rights movements, shee took a rest from writing but she resumed her writing career when she joined Ms. magazine as an aditor before moving to California in the late 1970s. In addition to her collected short stories and poetry, Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, was published in 1970. In 1976, Walker's second novel,Meridian, was published. The novel dealt with activist workers in the South during the civil rights movement, and closely paralleled some of Walker's own experiences. In 1982, Walker published what has become her best-known work, the novel The Color Purple which is about a young troubled black woman fighting her way through not only racist white culture but also patriarchal black culture, it was a resounding commercial success. The book became a bestseller and was subsequently adapted into a critically acclaimed 1885 movie as well as a 2005 Broadway musical. She has published a number of collections of short stories, poetry, and other published work. She expresses the struggles of black people, particularly women, and their lives in a racist, sexist, and violent society. Her writings also focus on the role of women of color in culture and history. Walker is a respected figure in the liberal political community for her support of unconventional and unpopular views as a matter of principle.
In 2007, Walker gave her papers, 122 boxes of manuscripts and archive material, to Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. In addition to drafts of novels such as The Color Purple, unpublished poems and manuscripts, and correspondence with editors, the collection includes extensive correspondence with family members, friends and colleagues, an early treatment of the film script for The Color Purple, syllabi from courses she taught, and fan mail. The collection also contains a scrapbook of poetry compiled when Walker was 15, entitled "Poems of a Childhood Poetess".