Alice Walker

Alice Walker (born Eatonton, Georgia, 1944) is an American novelist, poet, essayist and activist, African American and feminist. In 1983 she received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Color Purple, an epistolary novel that made her the first African American woman to win that prize in that category and that secured her place among the major American writers of the twentieth century. She writes in English, and her work sits at the crossroads of literature, family memory and the struggle for civil rights.

She grew up in a sharecropping family in rural Georgia, the youngest of eight children. Her mother, a seamstress with a strong character, gave her a sewing machine, a suitcase and a typewriter, objects that came to stand for independence and travel. At eight, a BB gun shot fired by one of her brothers cost her the sight of one eye. Her family treated it as an accident, while she always saw it as deliberate. The injury pulled her away from play and toward reading and writing, and it gave her a detached, clear-eyed view of the society around her.

She studied at Spelman College, where Howard Zinn was one of her teachers, and later at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Her first poetry collection, Once (1968), grew out of that period. She worked in civil rights in Mississippi and was involved in the movement, where she met Martin Luther King Jr. Her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), portrays an abusive, abandoned sharecropper and exposes violence within the family.

Her writing centres on the struggles of Black Americans, especially women, and on resistance to racist, sexist and violent societies. In The Color Purple the narrator, Celie, faces both the racism of white culture and the patriarchy within her own community. The novel was a major bestseller and was filmed in 1985 by Steven Spielberg, though the adaptation drew criticism for its portrayal of Black men. She later published The Temple of My Familiar (1989) and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), both of which revisit characters from the earlier book.

In 1983 she coined the term "womanism" to describe a Black or colored feminist, an idea meant to bridge Black women and the feminist movement. In recent years her work has also been debated because of her positions on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and accusations of antisemitism tied to some of her statements. Her legacy lies mainly in contemporary American fiction and in the discussion of how race, gender and class intersect.