Alice Walker Biography Essay

Alice Walker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, African American Novelist, poet, and social activist. Alice’s works are best known for their embodiment of the African American woman’s life. Alice portrays vividly the sexism, racism and poverty that often makes life a bit of a struggle. She also depicts as parts of that life, the strengths of community, family, spirituality, and self-worth.
Alice Malsenior Walker was born on February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia. Alice was then the eighth and youngest child of Minnie Tallulah Grant and Willie Lee Walker, who were sharecroppers. When Alice was eight years old, she was shot and blinded in her right eye with a BB pellet while playing cowboys and Indians with her two brothers. She became very diffident and timid by the whitish scar that appeared in her damaged eye. After being teased by class mates and

They lived in Jackson, Mississippi, where Alice worked as black history consultant for a head start program and a writer-in-residence for Jackson State College and Tougaloo College. In 1969 Alice finalized her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, this same year she had her daughter, Rebecca Grant. In 1977 her marriage with Leventhal ended and she moved to Northern California, where she lives and writes today.
Alice’s writing career reached an extremity in 1982 with the publication of her third novel, The Color Purple. The Color Purple, is set in the 1900s and analyzes a female African-American experience through the life and endeavors of its narrator, Celie. Celie endures ghastly abuse at the hands of her own father and later her own husband. This captivating work won Alice both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction in 1983. Three years later, Alice’s story, The Color Purple made the big screen. Just like the novel, the movie had compelling success, retaining 11 Academy Award