Saturday, August 10, 2019
Biography of Alice Walker
 |
| Biography of Alice Walker |
• Name: Alice Walker.
• Born: 9 February 1944, Putnam County, Georgia, US .
• Father: Willie Lee Walker.
• Mother: Minnie Telullah Grant.
• Wife / Husband: Melvin Rosenman Leventhal.
Early life of Alice Walker:
Alice Malsenier Tallullah-Kate Walker was born in Etienne, Georgia, a rural agricultural town, to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant. Both of Walker's parents were sharecroppers, although his mother worked as a worker to earn extra money. The youngest of eight children, Walker was first enrolled in school when she was just four years old at East Poonam.
At the age of eight, Walker injured his right eye after firing a gun at his brothers' BB. Because his family did not have access to the car, Walker did not receive immediate medical attention, leaving him permanently blind in that eye. It was after his eye injury that Walker started reading and writing. The scar tissue was removed when Walker was 14, but a scar still remains and is described in his essay "Beauty: When the Other Dancer the Self".
In 1968, Walker published his first poetry collection, Once. Walker's teaching and writing career overlapped during the 1970s. He served as a teacher as a writer in the Black Study Program at Jackson State College in Tennessee (1968–69) and at Tougaloo College in Mississippi (1970–71). While teaching, she was working on her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), aided by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts (1969; a government program to provide money to artists).
She then moved north and taught at Wellesley College and Boston (both University of Massachusetts 1972–73) in Massachusetts. In 1973 his collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, and Poetry, a collection of revolutionary petunias appeared. He received the Radcliffe Institute Scholarship (1971–73), a Rosenthal Foundation Award, and an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award (both in 1974) for In Love and Trouble.
In 1976, Walker's second novel, Meridian, was published, which was followed by the Guggenheim Prize (in 1977–1978). Another collection of poetry, Goodnight, Willie Lee, I Will See You in the Morning, was published in 1979, followed by another collection of short stories the following year, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (1980).
Alice Walker's career as a writer took flight in 1982 with the publication of her third novel, The Color Purple. In the early 1900s, the novel explored the female African-American experience through the life and struggles of its narrator, Celie. Celie suffers terrible abuse at the hands of her father and later from her husband. Compelling Work won both the Pulitzer Prize for Walker in 1983 and the National Book Award for Fiction.
In 1985, Walker's story brought it to the big screen: Steven Spielberg directed The Color Purple, which starred Selfie as well as Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg as Danny Glover. Like the novel, the film was a critical success, receiving 11 Academy Award nominations. In his 1996 work, The Same River Twice: The Honoring the Difficulty, Walker revealed his feelings about the film. In 2005, The Color Purple became a Broadway musical.
Walker's essays in Search of Our Mother's Garden: Womanist Prose (1983), sent by Earth: The World Trade Center and a message from Grandma Spirit after the bombing of the Pentagon (2001), are compiled, We Are the Women Waiting Waiting For (2006), and The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering with Whole World Awake to Being in Haram Way (2013). Walker also wrote juvenile fiction and critical essays on women writers such as Flannery O'Connor and Jorah Neale Hurston. He cofounded a short-lived press in 1984.