Alice Walker

Alice Walker 1944-, African-American novelist and poet, b. Eatonon, Ga. The daughter of sharecroppers, she studied at Spelman College (1961-63) and Sarah Lawrence College (B.A., 1965). She brings her travel experience in Africa and memories of the American civil-rights movement to an examination of the experience of African Americans, mainly in the South, and of Africans. A self-described "womanist," she has maintained a strong focus on feminist issues within African-American culture. Walker won wide recognition with her novel The Color Purple (1982; Pulitzer Prize; film, 1985), a dark but sometimes joyous saga of a poor black Southern woman's painful journey toward self-realization. Among her other novels are Meridian (1976), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), By the Light of My Father's Smile (1994), and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004). Her short-story collections include You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (1981) and the partially autobiographical The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000). She has also written poetry, such as Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973), Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965-1990 (1991), and Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003). Many of her essays are collected in Living by the Word (1988) and Anything We Love Can Be Saved (1997).

Bibliography: See biography by E. C. White (2004); studies by D. W. Winchell (1992), H. L. Gates et al., ed. (1993), and Ikenna Dieke, ed. (1999).

Walker, Alice (1944– ) African-American writer. Her volumes of poetry include Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973). Walker won a Pulitzer Prize for her epistolary novel The Color Purple (1982). Other works include In Search of My Mother's Garden (1983).

Walker, Alice (1944– ), Black American novelist, poet and short- story writer, best known as the author of The Color Purple (1982), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983. It tells the harrowing story of Celie, a young black woman in the segregated Deep South, raped by the man she believes to be her father and then forced to marry an older man she despises. Told through letters from Celie to God, and to and from her missionary sister Nettie, this story, like much of Walker's work, celebrates the strength of women engaged in struggles against the twin oppressions of sexism and racism. Walker has published collections of poetry, volumes of short stories, and a collection of ‘womanist prose’, In Search of My Mother's Garden (1983). More recently she has published the novels, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), a harsh examination of female circumcision, and By the Light of My Father's Smile (1998); and a memoir, The Same River Twice (1996).