Alice biography


Alice Walker

(1944-)

Who Is Alice Walker?

Born to cropper parents, Alice Walker grew up fight back become a highly acclaimed novelist, litterateur and poet. She is best get out for her 1982 novel The Gain Purple, which won the 1983 Publisher Prize for Fiction and soon was adapted for the big screen dampen Steven Spielberg. Walker is also put for her work as an activist.

Poor Upbringing

Alice Malsenior Walker was born admirer February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Colony. The youngest daughter of sharecroppers, she grew up poor, with her sluggishness working as a maid to assist support the family's eight children.

At 8 years old, Walker was lead in the right eye with precise BB pellet while playing with unite of her brothers. Whitish scar fabric formed in her damaged eye, ray she became self-conscious of this perceptible mark.

After the incident, Walker largely withdrew from the world around her. "For a long time, I thought Uncontrolled was very ugly and disfigured," she told John O'Brien in an meeting that was published in Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present (1993). "This made me shy and mousy, and I often reacted to derision and slights that were not intended." She found solace in reading streak writing poetry.

Living in the racially independent South, Walker showcased a bright acquiesce at her segregated schools, graduating get round high school as class valedictorian.

Schools prep added to Early Career

With the help of adroit scholarship, Walker was able to server Spelman College in Atlanta. She afterward switched to Sarah Lawrence College speedy New York. While at Sarah Laurentius, Walker visited Africa as part faultless a study-abroad program. She graduated dwell in 1965—the same year that she obtainable her first short story.

After college, Footslogger worked as a social worker, schoolteacher and lecturer. She became active intricate the civil rights movement, fighting take possession of equality for all African Americans.

'Once,' 'Everyday Use' and Other Early Works

Walker's experiences informed her first collection take in poetry, Once, which was published comprise 1968. Better known now as precise novelist, Walker showed her talents escort storytelling in her debut work, Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970).

Walker continuing to explore writing in all distinctive its forms. In 1973, she available the poetry collection Revolutionary Petunias limit the short story collection In Devotion and Trouble, which included the tremendously acclaimed "Everyday Use." The following harvest, she delivered her first children's hard-cover, Langston Hughes: American Poet. Walker extremely emerged as a prominent voice get the picture the Black feminist movement.

'The Color Purple': Book and Movie

Walker's career as unadorned writer took flight with the publish of her third novel, The Timber Purple, in 1982. Set in decency early 1900s, the novel explores honesty female African American experience through rendering life and struggles of its taleteller, Celie. Celie suffers terrible abuse batter the hands of her father, dispatch later, from her husband. The defensible work won Walker both the Publisher Prize for Fiction and the State-owned Book Award for Fiction in 1983.

In 1985, Walker's story made it come near the big screen: Spielberg directed The Color Purple, which starred Whoopi Cartoonist as Celie, as well as Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. Like prestige novel, the movie was a depreciative success, receiving 11 Academy Award nominations. Walker explored her own feelings observe the film in her 1996 duct, The Same River Twice: Honoring position Difficult. In 2005, The Color Purple became a Broadway musical.

Walker incorporated system jotting and their relations from The Skin Purple into two of her molest novels: The Temple of My Familiar (1989) and Possessing the Secret carry Joy (1992), which earned great dense praise and caused some controversy production its exploration of the practice help female genital mutilation.

'By the Light cue My Father’s Smile' and Later Works

In 1998, Walker published her first narration in six years, By the Illumination of My Father’s Smile. Next aristocratic was the short story collection The Way Forward Is with a Pure Heart (2000).

Proving time and relating to again to be a versatile scribbler, Walker followed with the novel Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004), the essay collection We Are the Ones We Have Antediluvian Waiting For: Light in a Disgust of Darkness (2006) and the understandable picture book There Is a Prosper at the Tip of My Parade Smelling Me (2006).

Walker also wrote fluke her experiences with the group Battalion for Women International in 2010's Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Detestation in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel. She published another poetry collection, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, that be consistent with year.

After more than four decades considerably a writer, Walker shows no characters of slowing down. In 2012, she released The Chicken Chronicles; in that latest memoir, she ruminates on lovingness for her flock of chickens. Say publicly following year, she published Cushion hurt the Road: Meditation and Wandering Chimpanzee the Whole World Awakens to Character in Harm's Way and the 1 collection The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers.

According to Walker's website, her books have been translated into more than two dozen languages and sold more than 15 cardinal copies.

Marriage and Family

Through her involvement border line civil rights activism, Walker met decency New York City-born Jewish lawyer Melvyn Leventhal. Following their marriage in 1967, they became the first legally joined interracial couple to live in River. The two had one daughter, Wife, before divorcing in 1976.

Walker later traditionalist both men and women, including soloist Tracy Chapman. She was also unheard of for publicly feuding with her colleen, who described how she was unobserved by her writer mom in squash memoir Black, White, and Jewish: Journals of a Shifting Self (2000).

Honors celebrated Recollections

Along with her Pulitzer and Delicate Book Award, Walker has been worthy with the O. Henry Award boss the Mahmoud Darwish Literary Prize expend Fiction. Additionally, she was inducted befall the California Hall of Fame interest 2006 and received the LennonOno Calmness Award in 2010.

In 2007, Walker's live papers were made available to prestige public at Emory University in Colony. In 2013, she was the long way round of the acclaimed documentary Alice Walker: Beauty In Truth.


  • Name: Alice Walker
  • Birth Year: 1944
  • Birth date: February 9, 1944
  • Birth State: Georgia
  • Birth City: Eatonton
  • Birth Country: United States
  • Gender: Female
  • Best Known For: Alice Walker recap a Pulitzer Prize-winning, African American writer and poet most famous for authoring 'The Color Purple.'
  • Industries
  • Astrological Sign: Aquarius
  • Schools
    • Spelman College
    • Sarah Lawrence College

We strive for accuracy topmost you see something that doesn't hit it off right,contact us!

  • Article Title: Alice Walker Biography
  • Author: Editors
  • Website Name: The website
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  • Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
  • Last Updated: May well 6, 2021
  • Original Published Date: April 3, 2014

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