The Life and Times of Alice Walker

1. The Life and Times of Alice Walker Amaya Worthem –Mackenzie Soper- Bianca Munoz – Melody Arzola

2. Alice Walker, her life and her writings… • This is a tale of triumph, strength, and survival, it is the tale of Alice Walker the renowned American author and activist. • Walker has changed the lives of many men, women and children that are faced with daily challenges. In Walker’s eyes change and personal triumph are possible despite any odds we are faced with. • This particular theme has driven her to write a plethora of novels, short stories, fiction and non –fiction, poetry and children’s stories.

3. Back in the day… • Born February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, Walker was the youngest of a bundle of eight children to parents Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Grant Walker. Walker’s parents were poor sharecroppers. • Living in the south Walker group up in an environment that consisted of racism and constant poverty. Walker learned early on about the struggle to make ends meet, this left a permanent impression on her writing. • Walker went through many life changing moments in her life, but one incident in particular would change her life forever…

4. In the summer of 1952, Alice Walker was blinded in her right eye by a BB gun pellet while playing “cowboys and Indians” with her brother. She suffered permanent eye damage and slight facial disfigurement. • Her self image received a life changing blow, not solely the incident itself but the way the incident affected her social life. • Rendered blind in that eye, Walker experienced more emotional trauma from the wound’s disfiguring scar tissue. She hung her head; although she turned to books for solace, she began to do poorly in school. She wrote her first poetry during this difficult period. • When she was 14, her brother Bill had the cataract removed by a Boston doctor, but her vision in that eye never returned. BB Guns and Post Partum Walker visited her brother in Boston. He took her to a local hospital, where the hated scar tissue was removed. Walker’s head came up, she made friends, and she became high school prom queen and class valedictorian. Although many years would pass before Walker would make peace with the injury, she ultimately came to attribute much of her inner vision to the suffering it caused. The experience of overcoming physical deformity, in some cases by its acceptance, is reflected in Walker’s art.

5. Leaving Childish things behind…College years • After graduating from high school in 1961 as the school's valedictorian and prom queen, Walker entered Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, on a scholarship. At Spelman she participated in civil rights demonstrations. She was invited to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s home in 1962 at the end of her freshman year, in recognition of another invitation she had received to attend the Youth World Peace Festival in Helsinki, Finland. She attended the conference and then traveled throughout Europe over the summer. In August 1963 Walker participated in “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” where she heard King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. • After two years at Spelman, Walker received a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, which she accepted. She became one of very few young black students to attend the prestigious school. Walker received mentoring from poet Muriel Ruykeyser and writer Jane Cooper. Her mentors helped stimulate her interest and talent in writing, inspiring her to write poems that eventually appeared in her first volume of poetry, Once (1968). • By her senior year, Walker was suffering from extreme depression, most likely related to her having become pregnant between her junior and senior year. She considered committing suicide and at times kept a razor blade under her pillow. She also wrote several volumes of poetry in efforts to explain her feelings. With a friend’s help, she procured a safe abortion. As her body recovered, she reclaimed her emotional health by incessantly writing poetry. Walker wrote a short story titled “To Hell With Dying.” Ruykeyser sent the story to publishers as well as to poet Langston Hughes. The story was published, and Walker received a handwritten note of encouragement from Hughes.

6. Always an activist, Walker became active in the Civil Rights movement, which was particularly concentrated around Atlanta during her two years (1961-1963) at the college. Spelman advocated turning out “proper” young women and discouraged political activism among its students. The school’s attitudes and the students’ frustration with them are suggested by Meridian Hill’s experiences at the fictional Saxon College in Walker’s novel Meridian (1976). • Following her graduation in 1965, she first went door-to-door in Georgia and encouraged voter registration, but she soon moved to New York City and worked in the city’s welfare department. While there she won a coveted writing fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference. • In the summer of 1966 she returned to Mississippi, where she met a Jewish civil rights law student named Mel Leventhal. After their marriage on March 17, 1967, they moved to Jackson, Mississippi. Walker worked with Head Start programs and served as writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College and Jackson State University.. • They were probably the first interracial couple in Mississippi and, as a result, had to deal with constant streams of violence and murderous threats from the Ku Klux Klan. An Activist with Means

7. The World of Academia • Even while pursuing civil rights, Alice found time to write. Her essay “The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?” won first place in the annual essay contest of The American Scholar. Encouraged by this award, she applied for and won a writing fellowship to the prestigious MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. • Walker subsequently accepted a teaching position at Jackson State University. While there she published Once. Her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, was published the same week that her daughter Rebecca Grant was born. The novel received great literary praise. It also received criticism from many African-American critics, who claimed that her book dealt too harshly with the black male characters. Walker disputed such claims, but her subsequent writing continued to dramatize the oppression of women. • Walker’s career took off when she moved from Tougaloo College and accepted a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute. In 1972 she accepted a teaching position at Wellesley College, where she created one of the first women’s studies courses in the nation, a women’s literature course. In 1976 she published her second novel, Meridian, which chronicles a young woman’s struggles during the civil rights movement. • Around the same time, she divorced Leventhal. Reflecting on the divorce in 2000, her daughter Rebecca published a frank memoir criticizing the self-absorption of both of her parents at that time.

8. Following her divorce, Walker moved to San Francisco, then to a nearby farm. Her second book of short stories, You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down, was published in 1981 while she was living there. The characters of her third novel, The Color Purple (1982), could not develop in an urban setting, emerging fully only after Walker found a place to live that reminded her of rural Georgia. • Heeding her creative instincts produced a novel that earned Walker fame, money, and literary recognition. The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award, was on The New York Times best-seller list for six months, and was made into a popular, although somewhat controversial, film by Steven Spielberg. An Award Winning Woman and a Leading Lady

9. In 1983, Walker published In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, a series of essays concerning her life, literature, the Civil Rights movement, and black women, among other subjects. Her fourth book of poetry, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, was published in 1984. Her second collection of essays, Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973-1987 (1988) addresses global concerns as well as feminist and political issues and also contains excerpts from Walker’s journal. Her fourth novel, The Temple of My Familiar, was published in 1989; it includes some of the characters from The Color Purple and again pushes the envelope of experimental writing in what critic Bernard Bell called “a colorful quilt of many patches.” • Her fifth novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), is a controversial exploration of female sexuality, a subject also analyzed in the 1998 novel By the Light of My Father’s Smile. At the beginning of the new century, she seemed to be returning to other genres, her 2003 collection Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth being her first poetry book in a decade. She came back to her most familiar literary form with Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004), the story of an aging African American female novelist in search of meaning — a less challenging and also less controversial story than her earlier novels. Her place as a writer who crosses boundaries, however, is assured.