Alice Walker - 1944
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San Pedro High School in San Pedro, California
Read another essay on Alice Walker written by Georgia student LaVonda Williams.
I. Biography
This essay was submitted by a student of Denise Marovich-Sampson, a teacher at San Pedro High School in San Pedro, California.
Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia to Minnie Lou Grant and Willie Lee Walker. Injured by one of
her brothers, the accident left her permanently blind in one eye in 1952. Despite several hardships, Walker traveled to Uganda, Africa as an exchange student in 1964.
Her first piece was published in 1967; it was a short story entitled "To Hell With Dying." Also that year, she married a white civil rights lawyer named Melvyn Levanthal. Although
they meshed politically, they eventually divorced in the mid-1970's.
In 1968, she had a daughter named Rebecca and published Once: Poems. In 1977, she was
appointed associate professor at Yale University. She received the Guggenheim in 1978. In 1979, she moved to California. In 1980, she taught African-American Studies at U.C. Berkeley.
In 1983, Walker became the first black woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Color Purple, and she published In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose.
Walker is a poet, novelist, and short story writer whose graphic depiction of the lives of southern blacks has established her as a major American author. Some of her other works include
Meridian, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, and The Temple of My Familiar.
II. Literary Works (partial listing)
In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women
(1973)
Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973)
Goodnight, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (1979)
Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1984)