Last reviewed: June 2017
Self-described womanist writer
February 9, 1944
Eatonton, Georgia
Alice Walker identifies herself as a “womanist”—that is, by her definition, as a black feminist who seriously concerns herself with the double oppression of racism and sexism. These two themes dominate Walker’s poetry, fiction, and prose. Born in 1944 to Georgia sharecroppers, Minnie Lue and Willie Lee (memorialized in Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning), Walker grew up in the small town of Eatonton. She was one of eight children. Her childhood was scarred, literally and figuratively, by an accidental BB gun wound to her eye when she was eight years old. Although the scar and loss of sight were partially repaired by an operation when she was fourteen, Walker acknowledges the part played by this accident in her becoming a writer. It forced her to withdraw from social contacts, but it allowed her to retreat into a world of daydreams (“not of fairytales—but of falling on swords, of putting guns to my heart or head, and of slashing my wrists with a razor”) and a world of reading and writing.
A scholarship for handicapped students sent Walker to Spelman College (a setting used in Meridian) in 1961; after two years, she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, from which she graduated in 1965. Here another painful personal experience precipitated her first volume of poetry, Once. Returning to college in the fall of 1964 from a summer in Africa, Walker faced the realization that she was pregnant, without money, and without support. She seriously considered suicide before securing an abortion. After graduation, Walker was awarded fellowships to both the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the MacDowell Colony, where she began writing her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, in 1967, the year she published her first short story, “To Hell with Dying.” In that same year, Walker married Melvyn R. Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer whom she had met through her active involvement in the movement. They had one child, Rebecca Grant, before their divorce in 1976. The following year, Walker received the Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction. Alice Walker, reading and talking about “Why War is Never a Good Idea” and “There’s a Flower at the End of My Nose Smelling Me”
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Alice Walker, reading and talking about “Why War is Never a Good Idea” and “There’s a Flower at the End of My Nose Smelling Me”
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Walker has acknowledged the influence of Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, and Matsuo Bashō on her poetry, which she sees as having much in common with improvisational jazz. Her lines are of irregular length; the poems are frequently short. Walker’s poetry is marked by an informal tone and a straightforward, unafraid, realistic approach to her subject matter. Her most effective subject is her own childhood. The clean, fresh, unadorned style of Walker’s poetry also marks her volumes of short fiction. In You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down, Walker experiments with nonfiction fiction as she weaves a historical perspective into the fictional fabric. In “Coming Apart,” for example, the narrator forces her black husband to see how pornography, black and white, continues the exploitation begun in slavery by introducing him to inserted passages from black writers Audre Lorde, Luisah Teish, and Tracy A. Gardner.
Walker’s novels similarly illustrate consistency of theme—oppression—with variety of structure. Her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, is a chronologically ordered, realistic novel following its black sharecropper protagonist through three generations in pursuit of integrity and dignity. Her second novel, Meridian, written during her Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, opens in Chicokemo, Mississippi, where ascetic Meridian Hill is working among the poor; the arrival of a friend and lover from her days as an activist in the Civil Rights movement throws the novel into a series of flashbacks.
As a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, Walker penned The Color Purple. In this epistolary novel, Celie, the young protagonist, overcome by physical and emotional abuse initiated by her father and continued by her husband, writes to God and to her sister, Nettie, exposing her painful life. It was this novel, adapted to the screen in 1985 under the direction of Steven Spielberg, which brought fame to Alice Walker. Although the film, a box-office success, was accused by many reviewers of having trivialized the novel, Walker herself was happy with the production, on which she was a consultant, because it brought a story of black women, told in authentic black speech, into the marketplace. The Washington Square paperback edition of The Color Purple sold more than a million copies. The Color Purple also won both the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1983 National Book Award for Fiction. A Broadway musical adaptation was nominated for a Tony Award in 2006 and a highly successful revival won a Tony Award in 2016. Walker served as a consultant for both the film and stage versions.
The crazy (“not patchwork”) quilt is an essential metaphor in Walker’s work: It is the central symbol in her powerful short story “Everyday Use”; it is also the vehicle in The Color Purple which allows Sofia, while quilting with Celie, to give her the courage to be. Walker has said that the enigmatic structure of her novel Meridian imitates the design of a quilt.
In her fourth novel, The Temple of My Familiar, Walker sustains a similar account of black women, but this time she also takes on the enormous challenge of rewriting the spiritual history of the universe. Despite the presence of Miss Celie and Miss Shug, two beloved characters from The Color Purple, the novel earned little critical praise or favorable media attention. Possessing the Secret of Joy relates the story of an African woman who endures terrible physical and emotional suffering in order to demonstrate her loyalty to the people of her tribe. Because of the polemical nature of the story, this novel also did not garner the same commendatory reception that the earlier novels received.
Walker’s years of civil rights involvement grew out of a conviction that black writers must also be actively engaged in black issues: “It is unfair to the people we expect to reach to give them a beautiful poem if they are unable to read it.” Her own activist stance is seen clearly in her In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, as well as in her untiring efforts to reestablish the reputation of the neglected black writer Zora Neale Hurston (by editing a collection of her short stories, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive) and to make the black poet Langston Hughes more available to children (Langston Hughes: American Poet).
During the early 1970s, Walker taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Wellesley College. After a couple of years in Massachusetts, she assumed editorship at Ms. magazine in New York City. After experiencing censorship and criticism following the publication of The Color Purple, Walker launched Wild Trees Press in the mid-1980s.
In the 1990’s and early 2000’s, Walker focused more on her activism and nonfiction work as a means to convey her views. In March, 2003, she was arrested outside the White House, in Washington, D.C., along with Maxine Hong Kingston, while protesting the war with Iraq. During the Israeli blockade of Gaza, in 2009, Walker participated in a protest trip to Gaza, which she drew upon for the book Overcoming Speechlessness.
Among Walker's many awards and honors have been the 1974 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, a 2010 LennonOno Grant for Peace, and a 2016 artist residency at her alma mater. An American Masters documentary about her life, Beauty in Truth, aired on public television in 2014.
In all the works of Alice Walker one finds a commitment to the preservation of the black heritage—the traditions, the culture, the family; to the necessity for putting an end to violence and injustice; to the relationship between individual dignity and community dignity; and to an insistence that women applaud their godliness.