The Life and Writings of Alice Walker

1448 Words3 Pages

Alice Walker is an American author, novelist, short story writer, poet and political activist. She was born in Eatonton, Georgia on February 9, 1944, the youngest child of eight. Her parents, a sharecropper and a maid, had little money. At the age of eight, her right eye was scarred and caused her partial blindness because her parents were unable to take her to the doctor for a week. The blindness left her to become teased and bullied by classmates; she became withdrawn and began writing to escape daily ridicule. At age fourteen, the scar tissue was removed, but she continued to feel like an outcast regardless of her accomplishments. She became valedictorian of her high school and went on to attend Spelman College on a full scholarship. She later transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, graduating in 1965. While at Spelman, she became involved in the civil rights movement. Walker continued with the movement, registering black voters in rural Georgia and Mississippi. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence, she married Melvyn Leventhal in 1967, a white Jewish civil rights attorney. The couple’s daughter was born in 1969. They moved to Jackson, Mississippi, becoming the first legally married inter-racial couple in the state. Together they faced racism and many threats from the Ku Klux Klan and other whites. She finished her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, in 1969 and it was published in 1970. When her marriage ended in 1977, Alice and her daughter moved to northern California. She still resides in northern California and continues to write today. Walker often uses the theme of preserving African-American culture. An example of her culture preservation theme is strongly shown in the short story “E... ... middle of paper ... ...Alice. “Everyday Use.” Perrine’s Story & Structure, 13th Ed. Ed. Helen Triller. Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2012, 2009, 2006. 108-115. Print. (http://theliterarylink.com/flowers.html), original source: Walker, Alice. “The Flowers.” Reading and Writing about Short Fiction. Ed. Edward Proffitt. NY: Harcourt, 1988. 404-405. Walker's The Flowers.Full Text Available By: Loeb, Monica. Explicator, Fall96, Vol. 55 Issue 1, p60, 3p Subjects: SHORT story (Literary form); CRITICISM; FLOWERS, The (Short story); WALKER, Alice, 1944- Database: Academic Search Complete National Humanities Center, 2007: nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/. In Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1967); reprint (paper) Harvest Books (Harcourt), 2003, pp. 3-9. Permission pending from Harcourt Inc. (http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-998)

Show More
Related

  • Analysis Of Countee Leroy Cullen's Incident

    1295 Words  | 3 Pages

    Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Literature. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000. 163-67. Print.

    Read More

  • What's Wanted To Forget In Everyday Use By Alice Walker

    1048 Words  | 3 Pages

    No matter where one is from or where one finds themselves today, we carry with us in some way or another a specific heritage. Certain events and circumstances can lead to someone trying to forget their heritage or doing everything in their power to preserve that heritage. Alice Walker’s “EveryDay Use” was published in 1973, not long after the civil rights movement, and reflects the struggles of dealing with a heritage that one might not want to remember (Shmoop). Alice Walker is well known as a civil rights and women’s rights activist. Like many of her other works she uses “Everyday Use” to express her feelings on a subject; in this case African American heritage. Through “Everyday Use” it can be seen that Alice Walker has negative feelings about how many African Americans were trying to remove themselves from parts of their African American culture during the time of the short story’s publishment. This idea that Walker was opposed to this “deracinating” of African Americans coming out of the civil rights

    Read More

  • African American History in A Red Record

    794 Words  | 2 Pages

    Gates, Henry Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2004. Print.

    Read More

  • Maya Angelou

    955 Words  | 2 Pages

    This piece of autobiographical works is one of the greatest pieces of literature and will continue to inspire young and old black Americans to this day be cause of her hard and racially tense background is what produced an eloquent piece of work that feels at times more fiction than non fiction

    Read More

  • American Poet: Phillis Wheatley

    1206 Words  | 3 Pages

    Walker, Alice. "In Search of Our Mothers? Gardens." The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Norton, 1997. 2383.

    Read More

  • Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Paule Marshall

    5114 Words  | 11 Pages

    Walker delves into the subconscious and ever-present spirituality that is found in African-American women and she believes that it is important to identify with this.

    Read More

  • Symbolism in Alice Walker's Everyday Use

    1557 Words  | 4 Pages

    Symbolism in Alice Walker's Everyday Use. History in the Making Heritage is something that comes to or belongs to one by reason of birth. This may be the way it is defined in the dictionary, but everyone has their own beliefs and ideas about what shapes their heritage. In the story “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker, these different views are very evident by the way Dee (Wangero) and Mrs. Johnson (Mama) see the world and the discrepancy of who will inherit the family’s quilts.

    Read More

  • Margaret Walker and the Harlem Renaissance

    1435 Words  | 3 Pages

    However, the anonymous voices echoed in Walker’s life and literature are not confined to her ancestral lands; they extend to include every culture known in America, the only land she had ever known. From birth to death, Walker never left America; the mostly white nation, whose culture is mainly derived from Europe. Walker received her education in white institutions and was taught by white teachers for a considerable part of her life. She was well versed in American, European; and world history, philosophy, and literature. She spoke English, French, and German. She read European and Russian world literature....

    Read More

  • Point of View in Alice Walker's Everyday Use

    1143 Words  | 3 Pages

    Point of View in Alice Walker's Everyday Use. Alice Walker is making a statement about the popularization of black culture in "Everyday Use". The story involves characters from both sides of the African American cultural spectrum, conveniently cast as sisters in. the story of the. Dee/Wangero represents the "new black," with her natural.

    Read More

  • The Works of Phillis Wheatley

    809 Words  | 2 Pages

    Gates, Henry Louis Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. 164-167.

    Read More

  • Comparison Of Alice Walker And Zora Neale Hurston

    1034 Words  | 3 Pages

    Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston are similar to having the same concept about black women to have a voice. Both are political, controversial, and talented experiencing negative and positive reviews in their own communities. These two influential African-American female authors describe the southern hospitality roots. Hurston was an influential writer in the Harlem Renaissance, who died from mysterious death in the sixties. Walker who is an activist and author in the early seventies confronts sexually progression in the south through the Great Depression period (Howard 200). Their theories point out feminism of encountering survival through fiction stories. As a result, Walker embraced the values of Hurston’s work that allowed a larger

    Read More

  • The Importance of Personal Identity in Alice Walker's Everyday Use

    623 Words  | 2 Pages

    Author Alice Walker, displays the importance of personal identity and the significance of one’s heritage. These subjects are being addressed through the characterization of each character. In the story “Everyday Use”, the mother shows how their daughters are in completely two different worlds. One of her daughter, Maggie, is shy and jealous of her sister Dee and thought her sister had it easy with her life. She is the type that would stay around with her mother and be excluded from the outside world. Dee on the other hand, grew to be more outgoing and exposed to the real, modern world. The story shows how the two girls from different views of life co-exist and have a relationship with each other in the family. Maggie had always felt that Mama, her mother, showed more love and care to Dee over her. It is until the end of the story where we find out Mama cares more about Maggie through the quilt her mother gave to her. Showing that even though Dee is successful and have a more modern life, Maggie herself is just as successful in her own way through her love for her traditions and old w...

    Read More

  • Margaret Walker

    1309 Words  | 3 Pages

    Margaret Walker was born on July 7, 1915 in Birmingham, Alabama to Reverend Sigismund C. Walker and Marion Dozier Walker (Gates and McKay 1619). Her father, a scholarly Methodist minister, passed onto her his passion for literature. Her mother, a music teacher, gifted her with an innate sense of rhythm through music and storytelling. Her parents not only provided a supportive environment throughout her childhood but also emphasized the values of education, religion, and black culture. Much of Walker’s ability to realistically write about African American life can be traced back to her early exposure to her black heritage. Born in Alabama, she was deeply influenced by the Harlem Renaissance and received personal encouragement from Langston Hughes. During the Depression, she worked for the WPA Federal Writers Project and assists Richard Wright, becoming his close friend and later, biographer. In 1942, she was the first African American to win the Yale Younger Poets award for her poem For My People (Gates and McKay 1619). Her publishing career halted for...

    Read More

  • Alice Walker

    717 Words  | 2 Pages

    •     Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia. She was born into a poor sharecropper family, and the last of eight children.

    Read More

  • Alice Walker's Literature

    1108 Words  | 3 Pages

    Most of Walker's fiction work is suffuse by her Southern background. Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia which is considered to be a rural town where most black workers work as lessee farmer. She was the eighth and the last child of Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker and Willie Lee Walker. Her parents were poor sharecroppers. In the summer of 1952 at the age of eight, she fell into a depression when her older brother accidentally shot her with a BB gun, causing her to lost one sight of her eye. (LLC n.pag) She later started to hidden herself from the other kids in her neighborhood. She explained, "I no longer felt like the little girl I was. I felt old, and because I felt I was unpleasant to look at, filled with shame. I retreated into solitude, and read stories and began to write poems." (Alice Walker) However later in her high school senior year in 1961, Walker got a rehabilitation scholarship to Spelman, a college for black women in Atlanta. In here, she became involved in the civil rights movement and associated in sit-ins at local business establishments. In her junior year, she transferred to another college in Bronxville, New York called Sarah Lawrence College and graduate there in 1965. In 1967, Walker married a Jewish Civil rights attorney, Melvyn Leventhal where she was an activist and teacher in Mississippi.

    Read More

More about The Life and Writings of Alice Walker

Open Document