Alice Walker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American author best known for her critically praised work “The Color Purple,” which portrays the story of a black woman who battles both racist white culture and patriarchal black culture. Walker is known for her works that address themes of gender inequality, racism, and patriarchy that are prevalent in African-American society. She is a feminist and an independent thinker. She was born into a poor family as the youngest daughter of sharecroppers. In the mid-twentieth century, black children in America were expected to work in the fields rather than attend school. Her mother, on the other hand, was a strong-willed woman who insisted on a good education for her children and sent Alice to school. She was a talented young lady who began writing at a young age. She received a scholarship to Spelman College in Atlanta after high school. During this time, she was influenced by Howard Zinn, one of her lecturers who was also an activist and became interested in the civil rights struggle in the United States. She was a published writer while still in college, and she rose to prominence as a key author in the Black Arts movement over time. She is a well-known social activist as well as an accomplished writer.
Childhood and Adolescence
Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Putnam County, Georgia. Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant, her parents, were sharecroppers. She was the eldest of eight children. Despite the family’s poverty, her mother worked tirelessly to ensure that the children had a proper education. She supplemented the family’s income by working as a maid.
Alice grew up in a time when black sharecroppers’ children were expected to work in the fields from an early age. Her mother, on the other hand, was adamant that her children obtain a good education and enrolled Alice in school at the age of four. She was an imaginative little girl who began writing at the age of eight.
In 1952, she was inadvertently injured in the right eye, and scar tissue grew over the wound. She felt self-conscious and bashful as a result of this. When she was 14, the scar tissue was removed.
She was valedictorian of her high school class and received a scholarship at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1961. She eventually transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in 1965.
One of her instructors at Spelman College, Howard Zinn, was also an activist, and he had a big influence on her ideas.
She became engaged in the civil rights struggle in the United States as a result of him, and she soon became an activist in her own capacity. ‘Once,’ her first collection of poems, was published in 1968 while she was still in college. The poems are inspired by her experiences as a civil rights activist. Her early work shows the influence of the French philosopher Albert Camus.
Career of Alice Walker
Alice Walker arrived to Tougaloo College in 1970 after accepting a post as a writer in residence at Jackson State College in 1968. She later became a black history consultant for the Friends of the Children of Mississippi Head Start program.
In 1970, she published her first novel, ‘The Third Life of Grange Copeland.’ It follows the narrative of a poor sharecropper named Grange, his wife, their son, and grand-daughter in rural Georgia.
Her novel ‘Meridian’ was published in 1976. It depicts the narrative of Meridian Hill, a student who becomes involved in the Civil Rights struggle. Many people thought the novel was a critique of the Civil Rights Movement’s 1960s and 1970s trajectory.
The novel that would make her a world-famous author was published in 1982. ‘The Color Purple,’ based on the narrative of Celie, a poor, illiterate fourteen-year-old black girl living in the American South, explores issues of sexism and racism faced by African American women.
‘The Temple of My Familiar,’ her first novel, was published in 1989. It’s a multi-narrative work that tells the intertwined experiences of several characters, each of whom is looking for important clues from their pasts.
‘Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful’ (1985), ‘Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems’ (1991), ‘Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth’ (2003), ‘A Poem Traveled Down My Arm: Poems And Drawings’ (2003), and ‘Collected Poems’ (2003) are just a few of Alice Walker’s poetry collections (2005).
Major Projects
The novel ‘The Color Purple’ is without a doubt her most well-known work. Set in rural Georgia in the 1930s, the novel focuses on the poor living conditions of African-American women in the South. The novel was well-received, and she received several significant awards for it. Later, it was converted into a film and musical with the same title.
Achievements & Awards
The novel ‘The Color Purple’ by Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983. For the same work, she won the National Book Award for Fiction. In 1997, the American Humanist Association named her “Humanist of the Year.” She has also received the National Endowment for the Arts’ Lillian Smith Award and the National Institute of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Award.
Personal History and Legacy
In 1965, Alice Walker met white Jewish civil rights lawyer Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal. In 1967, the pair married after falling in love. As an inter-racial couple, they were frequently harassed. They have one child, a girl, who was born in 1969. In 1976, the marriage terminated in divorce. In the 1990s, she had a relationship with singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman.
Estimated Net Worth
Alice Walker is a $300 million-plus novelist, poet, and activist from the United States. Alice Walker was born in February 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia. She is well known for her 1982 novel The Color Purple. Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for hardcover fiction.