Alice Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 when she took part in a Civil Rights March in Washington in 1963. She cites him as her inspiration to become an activist in the Movement. [1]
Alice Walker is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. In 1982, she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which she was awarded for her novel The Color Purple.
Alice Malsenior Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, an American rural farming town, to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant. Both of Walker’s parents were sharecroppers, though her mother also worked as a seamstress for extra income. Walker, the youngest of eight children, was first enrolled in school when she was just 4 years old.
Alice grew up in poverty in the rural South during the era of segregation and Jim Crow laws. At age 8 she was accidentally injured by a BB gun shot to her eye by her brother. Her injury was so severe that she lost the use of her right eye and her partial blindness caused her to withdraw from normal childhood activities, writing poetry to ease her loneliness. She spent a great deal of time working outdoors sitting under a tree.
Despite the hardships of her childhood, she was a gifted student who attended the only high school available to black students in her area and was the first person in her family to attend college. She went on to study at Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College. Her experiences growing up in the rural South and as a black woman in America heavily influenced her writing and activism.
Walker’s third and most famous novel, The Color Purple, is a 1982 epistolary novel that won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name. Though the novel earned critical acclaim, it has also been the subject of controversy, frequently banned by The American Library Association for sexual explicitness, explicit language, violence, and homosexuality.
Walker has published several other novels, collections of short stories, poetry, and other writings. Her work is focused on the struggles of black people, particularly women, and their lives in a racist, sexist, and violent society.