Background Information
                                     

                                                                                                                                                       
Introduction:

Alice Malsenior Walker is an African American author and poet.  She writes fiction and essays on race and gender.  She is best known for her novel “The Colored Purple”, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982.

Early Years:

Alice Walker is the youngest of eight children, born in Eatonton, Georgia.  Her father was a sharecropper and her mother was a maid.  At the age of four Alice’s mother enrolled her into the first grade. Alice grew up in a violent, racism, and poverty environment.  This left a perment impression on her writing.  After graduating from high school in 1961 as the school’s valedictorian and prom queen, Alice was awarded a full scholarship to attend Spelman College.

College Years/Activism:

During her time at Spelman from 1961-1963, Alice participated in the civil right’s movement as an activist.  As an activist she was also involved in registering black voters in Georgia and Mississippi.  And she participated with organized groups such as, Code Pink and Women for Peace.  In 1963, Walker left Spelman College and transferred over to Sarah Lawrence, a liberal arts college in New York City. When Alice was a junior at Sarah Lawrence, she traveled abroad to become an exchange student in Uganda.  During her senior year, she found out she was pregnant.  This led her to a deep depression and contemplation of suicide. A friend of hers, helped with finding a doctor to perform an abortion.  After the abortion, she slipped back into a deep depression. She wrote poems base on her experience.  In 1964, Alice graduated from Sarah Lawrence.

Marriage/ Personal life:

In 1965/1966, Alice met a Jewish civil rights lawyer and married him on March 17, 1967 in New York City. They later relocated to Jackson, Mississippi.  Where they were harassed and threaten, due them being an inter-racial couple. Alice became pregnant, but lost the baby. Alice accepted a teaching position at Jackson State University at the same time, she finished her first novel.  Soon after that, the couple had a daughter (Rebecca Grant) in 1969.   Alice and her husband divorced in 1976.  And Alice and her daughter became estranged; her daughter felt like her life was just a political symbol.  In the mid-1990’s, Alice Walker was having a romance encounter with singer-song writer Tracy Chapman. 

Alice Walker is still alive, living in Mendocino, California.  She is a vegetarian, gardener, world traveler, and spiritual explore.  


Notable Works:

        Alice Walkers’ first novel was The Third Life of Grange Copeland published in 1970. This novel received great literacy praise, but also a lot of criticism form many African-American critics. Critics stated that the book dealt too harshly with the black male characters. Later on her second novel, Meridian was published in 1976. Meridian received such acclaim that Walker accepted a Guggenheim Fellowship to concentrate full-time on her writing.During this time she completed her second book of short stories, You Can’t keep a Good Woman Down, and in 1982 she completed The Color Purple.

          

       This is book is easily her most popular novel. In 1983 she won a Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for her novel. The  book was then made into a movie produced by Quincy Jones and directed by Steven Spielberg. The movie was a hit. In 1984, she published her third volume of poetry, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful. In 1989, her second book of essays was published, Living By The Word, and in 1989 she published her epic novel, The temple of my familiar.
   
           
  

                    In 1996 a novel by the name of the The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, deals with her budding realization that she might be bisexual. Walker became more politically active in her writing around the late 1990s. Her nonfiction book Anything we Love can be Saved: A Writiers’ Activism was published in 1977 and contains many essays inspired by her political activism which include activities in the civil rights movement, anti-nuclear movement, environmental movement, the women’s movement and the movement to protest indigenous peoples. Later in 1998, By the Light of my fathers Smile was   published.                                                                                                                                                                                    

                                                                                         Now is the time Open Your Heart, is her most recent novel, and was published in 2004.  This novel received reviews from the New York Times, and the reviews basically stated that they couldn’t believe that Alice Walker, the author of the popular book The Color Purple, could have written because it was awful. But out of all the literature written by Alice Walker, she became most famous off her book, The Color Purple.                                                                             

      

     

Uniqueness and Speciality


Poetry
Once (1968)
Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems (1973)
Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (1979)
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)
Prose
The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)
Everyday Use (1973)
Meridian (1976)
The Color Purple (1982)
You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories (1982)
Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992)
Now Is The Time to Open Your Heart (2005

            Alice Walker is known for her activism in causes—environmentalism, spirituality, racial justice, women’s issues, and against female circumcisions. In her writing of her poems and novels she shares her inner thoughts and feelings. Most of her writing is inspired by what she has seen or experienced and her
writing wants you to feel their pain and hurt. Her writing reaches out to you and cries for your help. As a women, her voice is being heard through her poems and her poems want to change the world one step at a time. Most of her poems are focused on earth, poor, fear, love and war.

Cristism of Work

"I was 16 when I found a now-famous poem she wrote comparing me to various calamities that struck and impeded the lives of other women writers. Virginia Woolf was mentally ill and the Brontes died prematurely. My mother had me – a ‘delightful distraction’, but a calamity nevertheless. I found that a huge shock and very upsetting." 
                                                                   - Rebecca Walker
     
        Rebecca Walker, Alice walker's daughter, hasn't spoken with her mother in several years. She disagrees with her mother's values, ways of thinking and lifesytle. Alice Walker saw herself as an advocate for women around the world. He idea was that women were too supressed and that they needed to be uplifted and help. All the while Rebecca was left to basically fend for herself. To read the ful article, click on the link below:

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/05/23/alice-walkers-daughter

Regardless of this many people enjoy the works of Alice Walker, but the most popular is "The Color Purple". It is believed that after this novel, play, and movie came out, that her writing began to decline, but I guess you can have to power to do so, if what you have written in the past, is so extravegant, that people are still talking about to this day.


Additional Links

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/color_purple/
http://www.gradesaver.com/author/alice-walker
http://www.alicewalkersgraden.com/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Walker
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/84016.The_Same_River_Twice
aalbc.com/authors/alice.htm
www.georgiaencyclopdeia.org/nge/article