Alice Walker (1944 - )

Alice Walker was born in poverty in the racially-segregated community of Eatonton, Georgia, on February 9, 1944. Now a world-renowned author, scholar, and activist, Walker has become a powerful voice in the struggles for civil rights and for women's rights. Walker is best known for her novel, The Color Purple (1982).

In The Color Purple, as in many of her works, Walker explores the struggles of African-American women in a society that is at once racist and sexist. Walker's work also reflects the cleavages of race and gender that were characteristic of the civil rights movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. In Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973), Walker explores the role of African-American women in the male-dominated civil rights movement, while works such as In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983) distinguish the concerns of women of color from those of white women (in a distinction that Walker has popularized by using the term "womanist," as opposed to "feminist" to describe the feminist concerns of women of color).

Walker has received a number of awards for her work, among them: a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1969; a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship in 1971-73; a National Book Award nomination in 1973 for Revolutionary Petunias; and, a Pulitzer Prize in 1982 and an American Book Award in 1983, both for The Color Purple.

A scholar in her own right, Walker has explored the African-American literary heritage through studies of Langston Hughes [Langston Hughes: American Poet (1973)] and Zora Neale Hurston [I Love Myself When I'm Laughing . . . and Then Again When I am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (1979)]. A former faculty member at institutions including Tougaloo College, Wellesley College, the University of California, Berkeley, and Brandeis University, Walker has lectured independently for the past fifteen years. On April 29, 1999, Walker will present a lecture under the sponsorship of the UMKC Friends of the Library at the Unity Temple on the Plaza.

Sources:

Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, "Walker, Alice," in Facts on File Encyclopedia of Black Women in America (vol. 2): Literature, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (1997), 163-167.

Linda Metzger, et al., Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors (1989), 571-575.

Mary Margaret Richards, "Alice Walker," in African American Writers, eds., Valerie Smith, et al. (1991), 441-458.

For further resources for the study of Alice Walker, see the exhibit bibliography.

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