Alice Walker A Writing Activist

The Humble Beginnings  Feb. 9 th, 1944—Alice Walker is born to sharecropper parents (one of 9 children) in Eatonton, Georgia.  1952—Alice Walker is blinded by a BB shot by one of her brothers. This incident while physically traumatizing—also emotionally traumatizes her for life and she writes about it frequently.

Living With Grandma &Grandpa  Because of the eye, she went to live with her grandparents and also because of a teacher who told her parents about the schools in their district.  Although she always felt isolated and even punished for it.  Begins writing stories and poems as a way of dealing with her eye—the heroine always looked like Alice Walker.

More Experiences  1958 she visits her brother and his wife in Boston, MA. She has a cataract removed along with most of the scar tissue and she is given a fake eye which makes her look more normal.  1960 she graduates valedictorian from her high school, most popular girl in class and even prom queen.

Campus Activism 101  1961 Walker attends Spelman College, the famous African-American college for women. However, she ultimately rejects Spelman because it’s too nice and proper without the political issues and consciousness she craves in a changing world.  Her mom gave her a sewing machine (so she could be independent), a suitcase (so she could travel the world, and a type writer. Her community raised the money for her to take the bus to school.  She does try to participate in Civil Rights activities at Spelman, but there isn’t much push for “feminist” civil rights there.

Campus Activism 101  She went to the World Peace conference in Helsinki, Finland while at Spelman.  She also met Coretta Scott King & participated in the march on Washington where she heard the famous “I Have A Dream,” speech.  However, she noticed while these did great things for civil rights in small ways, there wasn’t anything that was directly making the lives better for women or the people back home.

Advanced College Activism  Spelman didn’t like Walker’s activism. It wasn’t what women should be doing. Their goal was to produce educated ladies for future black leaders, not to produce activists, so Walker left and went to Sarah Lawrence college in New York City.

1964  Walker went to Africa as an exchange student in Uganda. She wrote a lot there, mainly poetry about the people and their lives.  This was before the “Black Arts Movement” in America, but it certainly inspired her own writing.

Abortion  Alice Walker upon returning from Africa discovered she was pregnant and this was deeply distressing for her because not only was abortion a sin in her tight knit religious family, but there was little money to support herself as a scholarship student (no such thing as child support then either).

Abortion  She finally procured an abortion after considering suicide first as an option but slipped into a depression afterwards and graduated from Sarah Lawrence in  This is also an issue she writes about in her work. It is something when she does, the characters are troubled about and seek help within a society of women.

Post Graduation  After graduation, Alice spent the summer in Liberty County, Georgia where she helped to initiate the welfare rights movement. She went door to door to registering voters in the African-American community. Her work with the most needy citizens in the state helped her to see the impact of poverty on the relationships between Black men and women. Whenever she found some free time, Alice sat down and continued to write.  She moved to New York City where she worked for the welfare department. She was awarded her first writing grant in She had wanted to go to Africa to write, but decided against it and went down to Mississippi.  There she met a civil rights attorney, Melvyn Leventhal who was supportive of her writing and her love for nature

Married Life  She married Melvyn Leventhal in 1967 and had one daughter, Rebecca Walker (a well known author and feminist in her own right), and became the first interracial legally married couple in Mississippi.  While her husband fought school desegration in the courts, Alice worked as a history consultant for the Friends of the Children Mississippi Head Start Program history.

Writing As A Young Wife  In 1968, her first book of poetry, Once, that she had begun in college was finally published. Alice also made her official debut into the literary world when she published her first short story, "To Hell with Dying." The story, which was written during college was a based as a contradictory reaction to all of the negative feelings she had as a result of undergoing an abortion

1972  Walker takes Rebecca and they go to Cambridge, MA.  Walker teaches a course at Wellesley College in African-American Women’s Literature.  First of it’s kind in the country.  Second book of poems, Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems. This is nominated for a National Book Award. It eventually wins the Lillian Smith Award from the Southern Regional Council.

More Publications.  In 1974, Alice's book, Langston Hughes: American Poet was published, which was a reader whose intention was to teach children about the legendary Harlem Renaissance Poet. She was also hired as a contributing editor for Ms. Magazine.

1976  Alice moved to New York City with her husband and her daughter, Rebecca. While living there, Alice worked only part- time at the magazine and dedicated the remainder of her time to her writing.  Published, Meridan, a novel that was highly critically acclaimed about women in the civil rights movement.

1977  Her husband asks for a divorce, her father died and it was a very painful time for her.  She began work on a third work of poetry, Good Night Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning. After her poems were sent to her publisher, Alice began working on  what would be her third novel and most celebrated novel.

Sisterhood  Alice decides to start work on a new novel. Alice came up with the idea of writing a story about two women who felt married to the same man. She also wanted to make her novel a historical one. But she had problems figuring out a plot. The plot line for her novel did not become clear for her until Alice took a walk with her sister, Ruth, into the woods. While there, they discussed about a love triangle who they both knew about. Suddenly the missing piece of her novel came together.

New Beginnings  When the characters of her novel were beginning to form, Alice made plans to leave the house in New York she had bought less than three months earlier. Since it was her daughter, Rebecca's year to live with her father, Alice packed up her bags and flew alone to San Francisco, CA. When she arrived in San Francisco, she renewed her long-time friendship with Robert Allen, a man whom she met during her time at Spelman College and he was a student across the street at Morehouse College

Writing TCP  San Francisco was not a beneficial one for the growth of her characters. So Alice and her lover packed up their bags in search of a better environment. They moved to the city of Mendocino, a place in Northern California that reminded her characters of Georgia, where most of the setting of the novel would be taking place.

Tragedy  The book was written in what Alice termed as "Black Folks English." It was the kind of speech that wouldn't intimidate men and women, like her mother, whom she knew all her life. But her mother only read a few pages and never gets a chance to finish it. Her mother suffered a major stroke and as a result is never able to complete the novel her daughter had written.

Internal Cultural Criticism  Although she received a lot of praise for her novel, she received criticism from some in the African-American community who thought her novel portrayed black men in negative stereotypical fashion as abusers and rapists. Just like Zora Neale Hurston's critics during the Harlem Renaissance, some had not even read her book before offering attacks. Although she saw the critical attacks as being small-minded and ignorant, they still hurt none the less.

Awards  Nationally, Alice was offered a teaching position at University of California at Berkley in the spring of 1982 which she accepted. In the fall she works at Brandeis University. Alice earned an American Book Award for The Color Purple. She was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for fiction which she went on to win in She became the first African-American novelist to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Other Works  During this same year, Alice releases a series of essays, In Search of Our Mother's Garden's: Womanist Prose.  1984: Horses Make a Landscape More Beautiful (poetry)  (Walker and Allen also started Wild Tree Press for work they considered worthy of notice that might not get notice).

Other Works  In 1989, her fourth fiction novel The Temple of My Familiar was published.  Alice released her second children's book, Finding the Green Stone was published in  1992 Walker published Possessing the Secret of Joy. It discussed the horrors of female genital mulitation, an operation that is practiced mainly on the continents of Middle East, Asia, and Africa.