Alice Walker Biography

Writer

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Alice Walker wrote The Color Purple, the 1982 novel that won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a Steven Spielberg movie starring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg. Walker was a civil rights activist as a young woman in the American south, and an editor at Ms. magazine in the 1970s. The Color Purple tells the story of Celie, a poor black Georgia woman who struggles to overcome childhood traumas and achieve a sense of pride and self-worth. Though it was a novel that brought her greatest fame, Walker is recognized more as a poet and essayist. Her volumes of poetry include Once (1968), Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973), Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1984) and Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth: New Poems (2003).

Extra credit: Walker attended Spelman College in Atlanta from 1961-63, then transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1965... She was married to Melvyn Leventhal from 1967-77. They had one daughter, Rebecca, in 1969.

Walker appears with fellow author Astrid Lindgren in our loop on Critter Defenders. She also appears with Maya Angelou in our loop on Black History.