Walker, Alice (Malsenior)

Walker, Alice [Malsenior] (1944–), Georgia‐born author of fiction and poetry about African Americans. Her novels include The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), depicting violence among three generations of men in a black sharecropping family; Meridian (1976), about a black woman torn between the revolutionary civil rights movement of the 1960s in the North and her affection for the unsophisticated blacks of the South; The Color Purple (1982), treating two devoted sisters, black women, one of whom goes to live in Africa; The Temple of My Familiar (1989), involving three marriages over a long period of time and place, ranging from pre‐colonial Africa, post‐slavery North Carolina, and modern San Francisco; By the Light of My Father's Smile (1998), set in rural Mexico, celebrating sexuality as a means of achieving spirituality; and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004), about a middle-aged woman on a dreamlike spiritual quest. Her poems include Once (1968), dealing with both the civil rights movement and her experiences of living in Africa; Revolutionary Petunias (1973), autobiographical works about a Georgia childhood, black militancy in the North, and love poems; “Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning” (1979); Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1984); and Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003), reflecting Walker's spiritual and ecological interests. Her short stories about black women are collected in In Love and Trouble (1973) You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (1981). and The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000). She has also written a biography of Langston Hughes for children (1974), edited an anthology of the writings of Zora Neale Hurston (1979), and collected articles, reviews, journal entries, and other prose in In Search of Our Mother's Gardens (1984), Living By the Word (1988), and Anything We Love Can Be Saved (1997). The Same River Twice (1996) is a memoir of the controversy surrounding the release of the film version of The Color Purple.