Who is Alice Walker?
Novelist, poet and feminist Alice Malsenior Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. Alice Walker is one of the most admired African-American writers working today.She was the youngest daughter of sharecroppers, she grew up poor. Her mother worked as a maid to help support the family's eight children. Unfortunately, when Alice was 8 years old, she suffered a serious injury: She was shot in the right eye with a BB gun while playing with two of her brothers.After the incident, Walker largely withdrew from the world around her. "For a long time, I thought I was very ugly and disfigured," she told John O'Brien in an interview that was published in Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present. "This made me shy and timid, and I often reacted to insults and slights that were not intended." She found solace in reading and writing poetry.Living in the racially divided South, Walker attended segregated schools. She graduated from her high school as the valedictorian of her class. With the help of a scholarship, she was able to go to Spelman College in Atlanta. She later switched to Sarah Lawrence College in New York City. While at Sarah Lawrence, Walker visited Africa as part of a study-abroad program. She graduated in 1965—the same year that she published her first short story,The Third Life of Grange Copeland. In 1982, Walker received the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for her third novel, The Color Purple. Following this great achievement, she published a collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, in 1983, and in 1984 released a collection of poems, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful. She has also published the Temple of My Familiar (1989) and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), along with children's books and non-fiction work.