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The Life and Times of
Alice Walker
Amaya Worthem –Mackenzie SoperBianca Munoz – Melody Arzola
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Alice Walker, her life and her
writings…
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This is a tale of triumph, strength, and survival, it is the tale of
Alice Walker the renowned American author and activist.
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Walker has changed the lives of many men, women and
children that are faced with daily challenges. In Walker’s eyes
change and personal triumph are possible despite any odds
we are faced with.
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This particular theme has driven her to write a plethora of
novels, short stories, fiction and non –fiction, poetry and
children’s stories.
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Back in the day…
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Born February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, Walker was the
youngest of a bundle of eight children to parents Willie Lee
Walker and Minnie Grant Walker. Walker’s parents were poor
sharecroppers.
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Living in the south Walker group up in an environment that
consisted of racism and constant poverty. Walker learned
early on about the struggle to make ends meet, this left a
permanent impression on her writing.
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Walker went through many life changing moments in her life,
but one incident in particular would change her life
forever…
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BB Guns and Post
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In the summer of 1952, Alice Walker was
blinded in her right eye by a BB gun
pellet while playing “cowboys and
Indians” with her brother. She suffered
permanent eye damage and slight facial
disfigurement.
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Her self image received a life changing
blow, not solely the incident itself but the
way the incident affected her social life.
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Rendered blind in that eye, Walker
experienced more emotional trauma from
the wound’s disfiguring scar tissue. She
hung her head; although she turned to
books for solace, she began to do poorly
in school. She wrote her first poetry
during this difficult period.
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When she was 14, her brother Bill had the
cataract removed by a Boston doctor, but
her vision in that eye never returned.
Partum
Walker visited her brother in Boston. He
took her to a local hospital, where the
hated scar tissue was removed. Walker’s
head came up, she made friends, and
she became high school prom queen
and class valedictorian. Although many
years would pass before Walker would
make peace with the injury, she
ultimately came to attribute much of her
inner vision to the suffering it caused.
The experience of overcoming physical
deformity, in some cases by its
acceptance, is reflected in Walker’s art.
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Leaving Childish things
behind…College years
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After graduating from high school in 1961 as the school's valedictorian and prom queen,
Walker entered Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, on a scholarship. At Spelman she
participated in civil rights demonstrations. She was invited to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s home
in 1962 at the end of her freshman year, in recognition of another invitation she had received to
attend the Youth World Peace Festival in Helsinki, Finland. She attended the conference and
then traveled throughout Europe over the summer. In August 1963 Walker participated in “The
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” where she heard King’s “I Have A Dream”
speech.
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After two years at Spelman, Walker received a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College in New
York, which she accepted. She became one of very few young black students to attend the
prestigious school. Walker received mentoring from poet Muriel Ruykeyser and writer Jane
Cooper. Her mentors helped stimulate her interest and talent in writing, inspiring her to write
poems that eventually appeared in her first volume of poetry, Once (1968).
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By her senior year, Walker was suffering from extreme depression, most likely related to her
having become pregnant between her junior and senior year. She considered committing
suicide and at times kept a razor blade under her pillow. She also wrote several volumes of
poetry in efforts to explain her feelings. With a friend’s help, she procured a safe abortion. As
her body recovered, she reclaimed her emotional health by incessantly writing poetry. Walker
wrote a short story titled “To Hell With Dying.” Ruykeyser sent the story to publishers as well
as to poet Langston Hughes. The story was published, and Walker received a handwritten note
of encouragement from Hughes.
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An Activist with
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Always an activist, Walker became active in the
Civil Rights movement, which was particularly
concentrated around Atlanta during her two years
(1961-1963) at the college. Spelman advocated
turning out “proper” young women and
discouraged political activism among its students.
The school’s attitudes and the students’ frustration
with them are suggested by Meridian Hill’s
experiences at the fictional Saxon College in
Walker’s novel Meridian (1976).
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Following her graduation in 1965, she first went
door-to-door in Georgia and encouraged voter
registration, but she soon moved to New York City
and worked in the city’s welfare department. While
there she won a coveted writing fellowship to the
Bread Loaf Writer's Conference.
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In the summer of 1966 she returned to Mississippi,
where she met a Jewish civil rights law student
named Mel Leventhal. After their marriage on
March 17, 1967, they moved to Jackson, Mississippi.
Walker worked with Head Start programs and
served as writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College
and Jackson State University..
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They were probably the first interracial couple in
Mississippi and, as a result, had to deal with
constant streams of violence and murderous threats
from the Ku Klux Klan.
Means
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The World of Academia
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Even while pursuing civil rights, Alice found time to write. Her essay “The Civil Rights
Movement: What Good Was It?” won first place in the annual essay contest of The
American Scholar. Encouraged by this award, she applied for and won a writing
fellowship to the prestigious MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire.
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Walker subsequently accepted a teaching position at Jackson State University. While
there she published Once. Her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, was
published the same week that her daughter Rebecca Grant was born. The novel
received great literary praise. It also received criticism from many African-American
critics, who claimed that her book dealt too harshly with the black male characters.
Walker disputed such claims, but her subsequent writing continued to dramatize the
oppression of women.
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Walker’s career took off when she moved from Tougaloo College and accepted a
fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute. In 1972 she accepted a teaching position at
Wellesley College, where she created one of the first women’s studies courses in the
nation, a women’s literature course. In 1976 she published her second novel, Meridian,
which chronicles a young woman’s struggles during the civil rights movement.
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Around the same time, she divorced Leventhal. Reflecting on the divorce in 2000, her
daughter Rebecca published a frank memoir criticizing the self-absorption of both of
her parents at that time.
An Award Winning
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Following her divorce, Walker moved to
San Francisco, then to a nearby farm.
Her second book of short stories, You
Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down, was
published in 1981 while she was living
there. The characters of her third novel,
The Color Purple (1982), could not
develop in an urban setting, emerging
fully only after Walker found a place to
live that reminded her of rural Georgia.
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Heeding her creative instincts
produced a novel that earned Walker
fame, money, and literary recognition.
The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize
and the American Book Award, was on
The New York Times best-seller list for
six months, and was made into a
popular, although somewhat
controversial, film by Steven Spielberg.
Woman and a Leading
Lady
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In 1983, Walker published In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, a series of essays
concerning her life, literature, the Civil Rights movement, and black women, among
other subjects. Her fourth book of poetry, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful,
was published in 1984. Her second collection of essays, Living by the Word: Selected
Writings, 1973-1987 (1988) addresses global concerns as well as feminist and political
issues and also contains excerpts from Walker’s journal. Her fourth novel, The Temple of
My Familiar, was published in 1989; it includes some of the characters from The Color
Purple and again pushes the envelope of experimental writing in what critic Bernard
Bell called “a colorful quilt of many patches.”
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Her fifth novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), is a controversial exploration of
female sexuality, a subject also analyzed in the 1998 novel By the Light of My Father’s
Smile. At the beginning of the new century, she seemed to be returning to other genres,
her 2003 collection Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth being her first poetry
book in a decade. She came back to her most familiar literary form with Now Is the Time
to Open Your Heart (2004), the story of an aging African American female novelist in
search of meaning — a less challenging and also less controversial story than her
earlier novels. Her place as a writer who crosses boundaries, however, is assured.