Alice Walker

Alice Walker met Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a white Jewish civil rights lawyer, in 1965. The couple fell in love and married in 1967. They often faced harassment as they were an inter-racial couple. They had one daughter, born in 1969. The marriage ended in a divorce in 1976.

She was involved in a romance with singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman in the 1990s.

Alice Walker was born in Putnam County, Georgia, on February 9, 1944. Her parents, Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant, were sharecroppers. She was the youngest of eight siblings.

Even though the family was poor, her mother worked hard to ensure that the children received a good upbringing. She worked as a maid to supplement the family income.

Alice grew up in an era when the children of black sharecroppers were expected to work in the fields at a young age. But her mother was insistent that her children receive a decent education and enrolled Alice in school when she was four years old.

She was a creative little girl and started writing when she was just eight years old.

She was accidentally wounded in the right eye in 1952 and a layer of scar tissue formed over her wounded eye. Because of this she became very self-conscious and shy. The scar tissue was later removed when she was 14.

In 1968, Alice Walker accepted the position of a writer in residence at Jackson State College and moved to the Tougaloo College in 1970. Later on she became a consultant in black history to the Friends of the Children of Mississippi Head Start program.

She released her debut novel, ‘The Third Life of Grange Copeland’ in 1970. Set in rural Georgia, it traces the story of a poor sharecropper named Grange, his wife, their son, and grand-daughter.

In 1976, her novel ‘Meridian’ was released. It tells the story of a student named Meridian Hill who becomes active in the Civil Rights movement. Many believed that the novel was a critique of the path that the Civil Rights Movement had taken in the 1960s and 1970s.

The year 1982 saw the release of the novel that would make her a world renowned author. ‘The Color Purple’, which revolves around the story of Celie, a poor, uneducated, fourteen-year-old black girl living in the American South, explores the issues of sexism and racism that African American women are subjected to.

Her novel, ‘The Temple of My Familiar’ was out in 1989. It is a multi-narrative novel containing the interleaved stories of different characters, each of whom is searching for vital elements in their pasts.

The novel ’The Color Purple’ is undoubtedly the best known of her literary creations. Set in rural Georgia, the story focuses on the miserable quality of life of African-American women in the southern United States in the 1930s. The book was highly acclaimed and earned her several prestigious awards. It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name.