Essay About Alice Walker

Alice Walker

Thesis Statement: Alice Walker, a twentieth and twenty- first century novelist is known for her politically and emotionally charged works, which exposes the black culture through various narrative techniques.

Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia. Alice Walker was the eighth and last child of Willie Lee, a sharecropper, and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant Walker, a maid. When Walker was eight years old, one of her older brothers shot her in her right eye with a BB gun; the Walkers didn’t have a car, nor had a lot of money, and ended up not being able to see a doctor for a week, leaving Walker partially blind. Walker, being left blind, was teased by her schoolmates, and resented her father, and often at times felt suicidal. She then began to write poetry and stories, finding comfort in the solitude it afforded her.

Walker grew up attending segregated schools, first East Putnam Consolidated, and then Butler Baker High School, where she graduated in 1961 as Valedictorian of her class. She then attended Atlanta’s Spelman College, a college for black women, on a scholarship. In 1963, she was awarded another scholarship and transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. She later became pregnant in 1964, which again made Walker suicidal. She turned to her writing, and ultimately ended the pregnancy. After all the commotion, and problems Walker wrote her first published story, “To Hell with Dying” (1965) she later graduated Sarah Lawrence in 1965.

After graduation, Walker worked in Jackson, Mississippi, where she met and, in 1967, married civil rights attorney Melvyn Leventhal. She became pregnant again in 1968, but lost the baby due to somw issues. This led Walker to depression, and the loss...

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...t the only issues the critics have though. A few of Walker’s critics have noted that varieties of contemporary slang appear in the characters’ thirties speech. (Weisenburger 8)

Walker’s publication of her latest novel, The Temple of My Familiar, has raised the criticism bar. They complain that Alice Walker has adopted a mushy new age philosophy to confront historical Christianity that has misled and misplaced black women. (Hall 8)

Alice Walker is still alive today, and still continues to write. She has also won many awards such as The National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Price for Fiction. She was also inducted into the California Hall of Fame in the California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts in 2007.

Although she was criticized multiple times, Alice Walker found the good in the negative comments, and it made her become a even greater writer today.