Alice Walker

Alice Walker (1944- ), American Pulitzer Prize-winning author, poet, and political activist best known for her writings on the poverty and oppression of African-American women in the early 1900s, and on the themes of spiritualism, feminism, racial identity, and social change. Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, and educated at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, and at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. She wrote most of her first volume of poetry, Once (1968), in one week after returning from a trip to Africa and undergoing an abortion in 1964. The poems explore the subjects of love, suicide, civil rights, and Africa. She won the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for her best-known work, the novel The Color Purple (1982), which was praised for its strong characterizations and the clear, musical quality of its colloquial language. The novel was adapted for the cinema in 1985, and Walker’s book The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996) contains her notes and reflections on the making of the film. Her other novels include The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), the latter dealing with the controversial subject of female castration, and By the Light of My Father's Smile (1998).

Walker received many additional honours and awards, although she was occasionally criticized for her unsympathetic portrayal of men. She has also been active in the movements for civil and women’s rights and wrote about her life as an activist in Anything We Love Can Be Saved (1997). Walker’s volumes of poetry include Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973) and Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning (1979). Her work also includes the essay collections In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983) and Living by the Word (1988). In 2001 she published a book of stories based on her inter-racial marriage to Melvyn Leventhal, entitled The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart. Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003) is her sixth volume of poetry.