Who is Alice Walker?
Alice Walker was born on Feb 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia.
She is an American novelist, a poet, short story writer and a social activist.
Walker wrote poems which she would slip under the door of her professor of Sarah Lawrence College.
Her professor showed them to literary agents and four years later, Walker's first short story collection - Once got released.
Walker's poems in Once were inspired by Walker's own pregnancy that happened during her senior year, the abortion following it and a series of suicidal thoughts that followed the abortion.
Alice Walker took a series of non writer jobs in New York and Mississippi before returning as a writer in Jackson state University and Tougaloo college.
1970, Walker published her first novel The Third life of Grange Coperland .
The novel centered on Grange Coperland, a share cropper with low morals, who leaves his family and runs away from his debts where he works like a slave.
Walker later revealed that the brutal murder depicted inside the novel is based on a real incident from her hometown, Eatonton Georgia.
Walker released her 2nd novel in 1976, the novel was titled Meridian which is about a young black woman ‘Meridian Hill’ who chooses to support the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s.
Walker has taken inspiration from her own Civil Rights Movement days to pen down the story of her second novel Meridian.
Alice Walker published her best selling novel The Color Purple in 1982 which is about a 14 year old African-American girl Celie in rural Georgia. The novel is about Celie overcoming persecution and abuse of the racist white culture and suceeds in dealing with the patriarchal black culture to gain self realization and fulfilment.
Walker then published the novel The Temple of My Familiar in 1989 and in 1992 she published the novel The Secret of Joey whose plot had several characters from The Color Purple.
On her writing journey, she published short stories too. Walker’s 2000 published short story collection The Way Forward is With a Broken heart whose backdrop was the interracial relations.
Walker drew inspiration from her own relationship with Melvyn Roseman Leventhal, a civil rights attorney, with whom she was married for 9 years between 1967-1976. The couple had a daughter, Rebecca who is also an American writer and activist.
Walker has strongly advocated the upliftment of the women of color. She supported the boycott and sanctions against Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and supported JK Rowling’s views on tansgender rights for which she received flak on social media.
Walker’s public appreciation of David Icke’s book Human Race get off your knees: The Lion sleeps no more drew her the multiple accusations of anti-semitism.
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