Alice Walker

American · born 1944

Born Alice Malsenior Walker on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children of sharecroppers Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah Walker, she lost the sight of her right eye at eight when one of her brothers fired a BB gun at her. The family had no car; medical help came too late. Scarred and self-conscious, she turned inward to reading and writing. She graduated valedictorian from the segregated Butler Baker High School, took a state scholarship to Spelman College in 1961, transferred to Sarah Lawrence after the firing of her mentor Howard Zinn, and finished her degree in 1965. The poems she had been slipping under Muriel Rukeyser's door became her first collection, Once (1968), composed during a summer in East Africa during which she became pregnant and chose an abortion that nearly cost her life. She joined the civil rights movement in Mississippi, married the white Jewish civil rights lawyer Melvyn Leventhal in 1967, and lived with him in Jackson as Mississippi's first legally interracial married couple. The Color Purple (1982), an epistolary novel about a Black woman's life from rape and silence to letter-writing selfhood, won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Walker the first Black woman to take the latter. She traced her literary lineage backward to Zora Neale Hurston, found Hurston's unmarked grave in a weed-grown Florida field in 1973, and bought her a granite headstone reading A Genius of the South. She coined the term womanist for the specific feminism of Black women, who, she wrote, were not white women painted blue. She has kept bees, walked borders in Gaza, and written seventeen books of fiction. She lives in northern California.