Alice Walker

Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker, born February 9, 1944, is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. She came of age in rural Eatonton, Georgia, a farming town where her parents, Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant, worked as sharecroppers, while her mother also sewed for extra money. The youngest of eight children, Walker entered school at four and grew up under segregation, attending Butler Baker High School, the only high school available to Black students in Eatonton.

When Walker was eight, one of her brothers fired a BB gun that injured her right eye. Because her family had no car, she did not receive immediate medical attention and became permanently blind in that eye. After the injury, she began to read and write. The experience stayed with her, later appearing in her essay “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self.” She became her high school valedictorian and entered Spelman College in 1961 on a full scholarship from the state of Georgia. At Spelman, Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynd were important mentors. After Zinn was fired, Walker accepted a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College, where she graduated in 1965.

Walker’s first book of poetry, Once, grew out of poems she wrote as a student in East Africa and during her senior year at Sarah Lawrence. She slipped her poems under the office door of her professor and mentor Muriel Rukeyser, who showed them to her literary agent. The book was published four years later by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. After college, Walker briefly worked for the New York City Department of Welfare, then returned to the South. In Jackson, Mississippi, she worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and as a consultant in Black history to the Friends of the Children of Mississippi Head Start program. She later served as writer-in-residence at Jackson State University from 1968 to 1969 and at Tougaloo College from 1970 to 1971.

Her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, appeared in 1970 and examined the life of an abusive, irresponsible sharecropper, husband, and father. In the 1970s, Walker published in small feminist and lesbian publications in the South connected to the women in print movement. In 1973, with literary scholar Charlotte D. Hunt, she found an unmarked grave they believed to be Zora Neale Hurston’s in Ft. Pierce, Florida, and Walker had it marked. Her 1975 Ms. magazine article “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” later retitled “Looking for Zora,” helped renew interest in Hurston’s work. Walker’s second novel, Meridian, was published in 1976 and followed activist workers in the South during the civil rights movement.

Walker is best known for The Color Purple, published in 1982. The novel follows a young, troubled Black woman fighting her way through both racist white culture and patriarchal Black culture. It became a bestseller, won Walker the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and made her the first African-American woman to receive that prize. It was adapted into a critically acclaimed 1985 film directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg, and later into a 2005 Broadway musical that ran for 910 performances. Walker went on to publish novels including The Temple of My Familiar in 1989 and Possessing the Secret of Joy in 1992, along with short stories, essays, poetry, and nonfiction.

Across seventeen novels and short story collections, twelve nonfiction works, and collections of essays and poetry, Walker has focused on the struggles of Black people, especially women, living in racist, sexist, and violent societies. Her activism has included the Civil Rights Movement, advocacy for women of color through the term “womanism,” animal advocacy, pacifism, and support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel. She has also faced multiple accusations of antisemitism linked to her praise for David Icke and to criticisms of her own writings. For many readers, her words still carry force because they name fear, harm, and self-belief in direct language. As one of her widely shared lines says, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”