Alice Walker

Thesis Statement

“The life experience of Alice Walker encourages blacks to live”

Introduction

Alice Walker was born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia in the rural Deep South to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Walker. She was the youngest of their eight children. Walker grew up in a period of American racial segregation and her family struggled constantly with poverty. Her early brilliance with words and performance was noted by her community and through the help of friends, neighbors, teachers, and state scholarships; she was able to attend two prestigious women's universities: a black women's college, Spelman in 1961, and later Sarah Lawrence College where she graduated in 1965. She married Melvyn Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer and political activist in 1967. Their daughter Rebecca Walker was born in 1971. Best known for her novel The Color Purple, for which she was the first black woman to win the highest honor in American literature: the Pulitzer. The story was also made into a film directed by Steven Spielberg. Walker's contribution to the American literary canon is immense.

Background

Her mother's love and she will to survive despite their dreary life is reflected in Walker's writing. Her mother's flower garden added peace and joy to Alice's life and was a constant reminder of the possibilities for change that come with growth as expressed in The Color Purple. It's hard to imagine anyone in the country this novel could not reach. Walker's friend Gloria Steinem said. The color purple, the rarest color in nature, has come to symbolize the miracle possibilities. In the silent beauty of her mother's garden and the mysterious woods behind it, Walker observed nature every leaf and every creature in sight. In doing so, she developed an early love of the land and all that grows on it. The seeds of both her writing and her activism are deeply planted there. (Bloom, 19)

Life of Alice Walker

Even as young girl, Alice Walker was fascinated by her African ancestry. She listened carefully to her parents' stories about their family history. It saddened her to learn that her ancestors had come to America on a slave ship, packed like sardines in the hull of the ship. On board, the women were raped in front of their children, and when the ship landed in America, all the blacks including the children were auctioned to the highest bidders.

Alice could hardly believe how her ancestors had been treated in a country that promised freedom and justice for all. (Gates, 23)

She was amazed to learn that her father's great grandmother, Mary people, a slave, had been forced to walk across the state Virgina to Georgia while carrying two babies one strapped to each hip. But her parents told her funny stories too. She loved hearing “Uncle Remus” tales and discovered that her mother had heard the same tales from her part-Cherokee grandmother. Alice wondered if Uncle Remus was a Cherokee Indian rather than an African American, as most people thought. Early in her childhood, Alice sensed a bond ...