Alice Walker
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Chapter 8: Alice Walker |
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Alice Walker
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Walker was born February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, the daughter of tenant farmers. As a child she witnessed the economic oppression of the sharecropping agricultural system and violent racism of the South. From the close relationships she formed with her mother and aunts, she developed her notion of independent womanhood, a concept that is depicted so strongly in her writing. Walker began writing poetry while attending Sarah Lawrence College, graduating in 1965. After college she worked in Mississippi, registering blacks to vote. She continues to work for civil rights today. A constant theme in Walker's work is her attack on sexism in African American relationships and the oppression of black women. In addition to teaching at Yale, Wellesley, and other schools, she has edited and published fiction, poetry, and biography. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977. For her collection of poems Revolutionary Petunias (1973), she received a Wall Book Award nomination. Her best-known novel, The Color Purple (1982), won the National Book Critics Circle Award nomination in 1982 and both the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1983. It was made into an Academy Award-winning movie in 1985. Walker credits Zora Neale Hurston as an influence on her writing.
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