Alice Walker

A detailed Summary of Alice Walker

Best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple, Alice Walker portrays black women struggling for sexual as well as racial equality and emerging as strong, creative individuals. Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, the eighth child of Willie Lee and Minnie Grant Walker. When Walker was eight, her right eye was injured by one of her brothers, resulting in permanent damage to her eye and facial disfigurement that isolated her as a child. This is where her feminine point of view first emerged in a household where girls were forced to do the domestic chores unaided by the brothers. Throughout her writing career, Alice Walker has been involved in the black movement and displays strong feelings towards the respect black women get.

In 1961, Walker entered Spelman College, where she joined the Civil Rights Movement. Two years after graduating in 1965, she married Melvyn Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer; afterward, they worked together in Mississippi, registering blacks to vote. In the summer of 1968, she went to Mississippi to be in the heart of the civil-rights movement, helping people who had been thrown off farms or taken off welfare roles for registering to vote. In New

However, many critics have objected to its representation of black men. The main problem is its representation of the husband, who was extremely violent and abusive, which some think seemed to represent the whole of the Black American manhood. Astrid Roemer, a journal writer believes that "Many of the critics think that it hurt the black movement more than it helped because of how she depicted the black man (Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters, p. 294)." This interpreted his character as a composite of black men in general, but she was even more disappointed about the public's response to The Color Purple in that people said, "this doesn't happen." What was really upsetting was the lack of empathy for the woman in Walker's story.

In 1970, Walker published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, about the ravages of racism on a black sharecropping family. In Meridian, 1976, her second novel, she explored a woman's successful efforts to find her place in the Civil Rights Movement. She read much of Flannery O'Conner's work and greatly admired her.

Walker expresses her view on women in the following way: Exquisite butterflies trapped in an evil honey, toiling away their lives in an era, a century, that did not acknowledge them, except as the 'mule of the world.' They dreamed dreams that no one knew not even countryside crooning lullabies to ghosts, and drawing the mother of Christ in charcoal on courthouse walls (In Search of Mothers' Gardens, Walker)."

Overall, Walker has been a very influential author throughout the black community, and her audiences are very much interracial. Although many of the criticisms are controversial over her view of black men, through this research it is concluded that the depiction cannot be narrowed down to black men. She was merely describing the kind of man who had the potential and who was abusive. Not suprisingly, most of the controversy streams from the fact that there aren't other black male characters portrayed to counteract the depiction of the abuser.

York, she worked as an editor at Ms. Magazine, and her husband worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Much of Walker's writings are very personal. For example, one of her first books once was written during a time in which she was pregnant and suicidal and it described how she had an abor

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Category: People