Alice Walker: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author's Early Life

On February 9, 1944, Alice Malsenior Walker was born in Eatonton, as the last born in a family of eight "The first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Alice Walker was born the eighth child of sharecroppers Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker, on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia" (Samuels et al. para. 1). Outgoing, intelligent, and loved by everyone, she enjoyed a happy early childhood. At the age of eight, she was accidentally injured by her brother while they were playing; the hit from the BB gun blinded her right eye, and she was emotionally and physically scarred. (Alice Walker para. 5). She felt that she was not adored anymore and so she withdrew into the world of introspection and books, which she later asserted that it improved her empathy with the suffering of other people and her observational skills. For nearly six years, she experienced guilt and shame of feeling like an outcast. When Walker was 14, she underwent a procedure to remove the cataract in her eye, which brought back her sense of self-esteem and looks (Alice Walker para. 5). In 1961, she advanced from High School as a prom queen and class valedictorian and obtained a scholarship to join Spelman College in Atlanta, among the pioneer African American women's institution in America. This paper seeks to indicate that Alice Walker's writing was influenced by her real-life experiences, such as poor background, low self-esteem, and education.

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In Spelman College, Walker hugely participated in the civil rights movement, she was involved in the 1963 March on Washington and studied along with prominent radical historians like Stoughton Lynd and Zinn Howard. Walker later obtained a scholarship to attend the fancy Sarah Lawrence College in New York ("Alice Walker." Para. 7). Mentored by poets Rukeyser Muriel and Cooper Jane and her teachers, Walker committed herself to become an author. She wrote numerous poems, which through the help of poet Rukeyser, constituted her first book published in 1968 (Whitted para.8). After Walker graduated from Sarah Lawrence, she briefly worked in New York City at the welfare office, until she noticed that working here left her minimal time to focus on her writing. She later went to a summer job in Mississippi, working for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, her duty was setting up civil rights of underprivileged African American in the strongest of the South segregationist.

People in the environment that Walker grew up were racists and poor, and these were primary factors for her activism activities. "Here she met and fell in love with her co-worker, the young Jewish civil rights lawyer Melvyn Leventhal. They married in 1967 despite the sharp disapproval of his mother and the fears of her family and their friends for their safety - in Mississippi" (Deutsche Website, para. 9). Her mother was worried about the safety of her friends and family because, at that time in Mississippi, biracial marriage was illegal, and miscegenation was condemned. She had her first daughter in 1969, and duties of being a mother, teaching and writing became overwhelming for her. However, her talent and drive had already put her on an inevitable course, and in 1970, she published her first novel talking about the misrepresentation of black masculinity and its eventual redemption, which was called "The Third Life of Grange Copeland." Walker then went back to the north on a conference at the Bunting Institution. She then became an editor for the Ms. Magazine while in New York City, and started a long-term partnership with Steinem Gloria. She later published the novel "Meridian" in 1976; it was about the political and personal conflict of the civil rights movement. Her devotion to supporting black women writers was evident.

When she spent her summer in Uganda and Kenya, Walker discovered the ravages of colonialism and disappointed her zeal for the African independence movement in the mid-20th century. The poetry Walker's earliest volume "Once" was centered on her visits to Uganda and Kenya, and her encounters in the civil rights association. "She supports antinuclear and environmental causes, and her protests against the oppressive rituals of female circumcision in Africa and the Middle East make her a vocal advocate for international women's rights" (Whitted para. 6). "Once" additionally had meditations on suicide and love, which was inspired by the philosophy of Camus Albert and Japanese haiku and in her following collection "Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems," Walker revisits her history in the south, while other lines confronted the over-powerful political aggressiveness. This volume was awarded the Lilian Smith book Award in 1973. Other than her fourth collection of poems, "Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful" Alice has brought together her initially printed poems in the volume "Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthing Poems."

One of Alice's earliest short fiction, "To hell with dying" caught poet Hughes Langston attention, who incorporated it in his 1967 collection, "The Best Stories by Negro Writers." In 1973, "To Hell with Dying" was republished in Walker first volume of short stories, "In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women." her second volume, "You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down", maintains her striking display of the experiences of women by stressing such delicate matters as abortion and rape. Her stories were linked to the unwanted pregnancy that almost made her commit suicide, but she managed to get an illegal abortion. "Alice Walker's stunning 1982 novel The Color Purple won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 making the Georgia-born author and poet the first black woman ever to receive the award for fiction". (Harris para.1). "The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart" is her third volume that was published in 2000. Walkers six novel focus more focused on the internal experience of black American life than on the relation between black and whites. Her most famous novel was "Color Purple," which received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 (Harris 8). Other novels by Walker include "Now is The Time to Open Your Heart (2004)", "By The Light of My Father's smile(1998)", and "Temple of My Familiar (1989)", and "Possessing The Secret of Joy(1992)"

Works Cited

"Alice Walker." Deutsche Website, www.fembio.org/english/biography.php/woman/biography/ Alice-walker/.

Harris Abrams, Patricia. "The Gift of Loneliness: Alice Walker's The Color Purple." Language Arts Journal of Michigan 1.2 (1985): p8

Samuels, Wilfred D. "Alice M. Walker (1944- ) BlackPast." BlackPast, March 5. 2019, www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/walker-alice-m-1944/.

Whitted, Qiana. "Alice Walker (b. 1944)." New Georgia Encyclopedia, August 9, 2018, www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/alice-walker-b-1944