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alice walker

alice walker Famous writers are everywhere, but what are the writers famous for. People may know Alice Walker as a famous writer, but what was she famous for? When I asked people questions about Alice Walker, some can only give some vital statistics and some will just shrug their shoulder and say, “I don’t know.” In my research paper I will be giving some brief facts about Alice Walker and I will also be answering some questions. Questions like “What did Alice Walker do to make her a famous writer?” “What obstacles did she have to go through to become a popular writer?” and “How is Alice Walker doing now?” These are some of the most frequently asked questions and I will be answering them in this research paper. Who is Alice Walker? Her full name is Alice Malsenior Walker. She was born on February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia. She was the eight and youngest child of Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker and Willie Lee Walker. Her parents were poor sharecroppers. In the summer of 1952 Alice Walker is blinded in her right eye due to a BB gun pellet while she was playing “cowboys and indian” with her brother. When graduating high school in 1961, she was her school’s valedictorian and was the prom queen that year. She went to Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia on scholarship. While in Spelman as a freshman, Alice Walker participated in the civil rights demonstrations. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. invited her to the Youth World Peace Festival in Helsinki, Finland. After attending the conference she started to love traveling around meeting many people and cultures of the world. She traveled to Washington D.C. to participate in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. She was also there to hear Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. She returned to Spelman College for her junior year. She found out that she has received a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Walker was planning to stay at Spelman, but after her teacher has encouraged her to attend Sarah Lawrence she decide to accept the challenge. In Sarah Lawrence, Walker enjoyed the teaching of poetry by Muriel Ruykeyser and writer Jane Cooper who nurtured her interest and talent in writing. What did Alice Walker do to make her a famous writer? It all started during her senior year in Sarah Lawrence, where she realized that she was pregnant. She was so frightened because she didn’t know how to tell her parents. Walker thought about committing suicide at one time, but with help from a classmate she was able to have a safe abortion. While recovering from the depression, she wrote a short story titled “To Hell with Dying”. Her teacher Muriel Ruykeyser sent the story to publisher and to the African-American poet Langston Hughes; the story was later on published when she was 21 years old. She graduated Sarah Lawrence in 1965. She later on fell in love with a Jewish law student named Mel Leventhal. Mel encouraged Walker to write. She continued her writing, also accepted a teaching position at Jackson State University and she published her first volume of poetry, “Once.” Walker finished her first novel “The Third Life of Grange Copeland.” Since the beginning of her writing career she has written 16 books, including five novels, several collections of essays, short stories, children’s books, and poems. She discusses topics such as spousal abuse, fear of death, female sexuality, and incest (Whitaker 86). In 1973 she published her first collection of short stories, “In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women” and her second volume of poetry titled “Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems.” The thing she did to make her famous, as a writer was that she wrote stuff that she believed in and would not change anything just because of criticism about her thoughts. What obstacle did she have to go through to become a popular writer? Since the time she started to write novels, it was a segregated time. She was in civil rights movements and at that time women did not have equal rights like the men. When the first novel “The Third Life of Grange Copeland” was published, she received criticism. The story was about a murder of a woman by her husband. Many African-American critics said that she dealt with too harshly with the black male character in her book, but Walker responded saying that women are all too often abused by men they love. Since her books were published during the civil rights movements and the stories in the books criticizes black men. But her main purpose was to write about husbands that were extremely violent and abusive. Many critics think that her books were hurt the black movement more than it helped because it depicted black men. Walker was disappointed with people because they interpreted the character as a black man and not see the existence of child and spousal abuses. She said “ I think the most chilling thing to me about the response to the Color Purple was that the people said ‘this doesn’t happen’… what was the lack of empathy for the woman we ought to look at the woman… we ought to look at this because we don’t want those women or children suffering” (Whitaker 89). As time went on her work was appreciated. She finished “The Color Purple.” “The Color Purple” won the Pulitzer Prize, American Book Award and escalated Walker to worldwide fame. People started to acknowledge her works, realizing her main points of her stories. How is Alice Walker doing now? In Shambhala Sun: A Wind Through the Heart, a conversation with Alice Walker and Sharon Salzberg on loving kindness in a painful world. In the conversation they talk about their feelings of the world. Melvin McLeod asked Walker, “Many people might hope that they could access such love in their lives, love for themselves and for others, but how does one actually do it?”(Sealeve, 1998) Walker answers “Well, for me it has always been through activism. I’ve been a very contemplative person by nature, and was fortunate enough always to live very far out in the wilds of the country. I think this is where all meditation really comes from, that feeling spaciousness in the countryside or with nature. But I was also very lucky to have been laces in a part of the country where one has to struggle politically and socially in order to grow, and actually to exist at all. So I was brought into contact with people and movements and with forces for change in society, and I could not help but grow. It was just inevitable that if I looked out and saw people in all their radiant fighting beauty, then I would just stuck with love for them” (Sealeve, 1998). In this conversation, I found out that Walker has found her inner self and trying to help others find themselves in this painful world. This conversation talks about Walker’s experience through life, but I have also found out that she has realized it was worth the experience to through because she found out that life is tough and if you stay tough you can get through life. Walker felt pain in this world back then, but time went on and now she feels good about herself and trying to get her word across people. Bibliography: Bibliography 1. Bloom, Harold. Alice Walker: (Modern Critical Views, Series2). January 1992. 2. Gates, Henry Louis and K. A. Appiah. Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. January 1993. 3. Kramer, Barbara. Alice Walker: Author of the Color Purple (People to Know Series). August 1995. 4. McLeod, Melvin. “A Wind through the Heart.” Shambhala Sun. August 1998. http://www.shambhalasun.com/alice.html.

Word Count: 1291