Alice Walker
Best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple, portrays black women struggling for sexual as well as racial equality and emerging as strong, creative individuals. Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, the eighth child of Willie Lee and Minnie Grant Walker. When Walker was eight, her right eye was injured by one of her brothers, resulting in permanent damage to her eye and facial disfigurement that isolated her as a child. This is where her feminine point of view first emerged in a household where girls were forced to do the domestic chores unaided by the brothers. Throughout her writing career, has been involved in the black movement and ...
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vote. In New York, she worked as an editor at Ms. Magazine, and her husband worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
In 1970, Walker published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, about the ravages of racism on a black sharecropping family. In Meridian, 1976, her second novel, she explored a woman’s successful efforts to find her place in the Civil Rights Movement. She read much of Flannery O’Conner's work and greatly admired her.
For one thing, O’Conner practiced economy. According to Herbert Mitgang of the New York Times, "She also knew that the question of race was really just the first question on a long list"(1983).
Much of Walker’s writings are very personal. For example, one of her first books once was written during a time in which she was pregnant and suicidal and it described how she had an abortion and dealt with all of its after effects. Unlike many other authors, she is not afraid to write about very personal experiences she has ...
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is referring to in the title is her own mother’s talent in art and gardening. She talks about how well known her mother was for her gardening skills that even strangers would stop and admire her handiwork. She points out the fact that it was so beautiful that her childhood, which was filled with poverty and sadness, was made a little more bearable because of it. When she thinks back on it, all she remembers is the beautiful neighborhood, and has a talent for bringing beauty to the forefront. The fact is though she was never given the opportunity to explore it like she may have been had she been a white woman in America.
Walker expresses her view on women in the following ...
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"Alice Walker." Essayworld.com. June 9, 2005. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Alice-Walker/28245.
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