Alice Walker

Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944, into a family of sharecroppers near Eatonton, Georgia. Her father, Willie Lee Walker, was the grandson of slaves. Walker's enslaved paternal great-great-grandmother, Mary Poole, had walked from Virginia to Georgia carrying two of her children on her hips. Walker's relationship with her father became strained as she grew into adolescence and showed a proclivity for intellectual pursuits. Although her father was brilliant, his educational opportunities had been limited, and he feared that education would place barriers between him and his children (Bloom, 11). When Walker left her home for Spelman College in Atlanta, her relationship with her father ended.

While she was attending college, Walker spent her summers working for the Civil Rights movement in Georgia. She was graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965, and after graduation, she became even more involved in the Civil Rights movement. In 1967, Walker was married to lawyer Mel Leventhal and moved with him to Mississippi. Leventhal worked as a civil rights attorney in the Jackson school desegregation cases, and Walker worked with Head Start programs and held writer-in-residence positions at Tougaloo College and Jackson State University. She subsequently taught at Wellesley College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of California at Berkeley, and Brandeis University.

In 1970, Walker published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland. Although Grange Copeland is the protagonist of the novel, Walker focuses on his treatment of African American women. Walker's main concerns in her novels are the powerlessness of African American women and sexist behavior on the part of men. In 1972, after the publication of The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Walker left Mississippi to teach at Wellesley College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (Bauer, 143).

The following year, Walker published a book of poetry, Revolutionary Petunias (1973), for which she won the Lillian Smith Award. This small volume of poems is a celebration of people who refuse to fit into other people's molds. She also published a book of short stories, In Love and Trouble (1973). The stories in this first collection depict African American women who are victimized by racism and/or sexism. They are women who are not whole, are often mute, and who are used and abused by the men they love.

In 1976, Walker published her second novel. Meridian is the story of a young woman's personal development in the midst of ...