Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Alice Walker
Standard Name: Walker, Alice
Birth Name: Alice Malsenior Walker
Married Name: Alice Leventhal
Self-constructed Name: Tallulah-Kate
AW
is an African-American writer and activist, who began publishing in the late 1960s and is best known for her novel The Color Purple. As well as other novels, she publishes or has published poems, short stories, essays, and journalism, and has produced a biography for children. All are linked by her passionate activism on a range of related social and political topics. Over the course of her career she has drawn fire both from white commentators for alleged bias in favour of her black characters, and from black commentators for allegedly bringing blacks into disrepute by unflattering depictions of them.
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MS
had a conversation with Alice Walker
, which was published as Wild Women Don't Get the Blues in Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women.
Sulter, Maud. “Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues”. Charting the Journey, edited by Shabnam Grewal, Jackie Kay, Liliane Landor, Gail Lewis, and Pratibha Parmar, Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1988, pp. 100 - 10.
100-10
Cultural formation
Maya Angelou
Born black in the Southern USA and raised mainly in a small and backward, rigidly segregated Arkansas town in which white people systematically victimised blacks (the segregation was so complete that most Black children...
Education
Malorie Blackman
MB
was shaped by her reading outside school. She never entered a bookshop until she was fourteen, but relied on libraries. Early favourites were C. S. Lewis
's Narnia books, Johanna Spyri
's Heidi books...
Friends, Associates
Tillie Olsen
Olsen's friendship with another writer, Alice Walker
, survived various fallings-out. It finally ended when Olsen visited China in June 1983 with a party including Walker and Paule Marshall
; the issue was Olsen's monopolizing...
Health
Maya Angelou
At about this time MA
suffered a particularly painful instance of race prejudice when she had toothache and a white dentist refused to see her. Her grandmother compelled him to pay for her treatment (by...
Intertextuality and Influence
Meiling Jin
In the introduction to the book of poems that was her first publication, MJ
noted that poetry was a form of expression that comes easier to me than most others. This state of affairs was...
Intertextuality and Influence
Naomi Alderman
NA
says this book was facilitated by the success of fictions about other, distinct communities: Zadie Smith
's White Teeth, Monica Ali
's Brick Lane, and especially influenced by Jeanette Winterson
's Oranges...
Intertextuality and Influence
Pat Barker
PB
says that one stage she threw away the manuscript of this novel in despair, but her husband
rescued it from the bin.
Jaggi, Maya. “Pat Barker. Dispatches from the front”. The Guardian, pp. G2: 16 - 19.
18
She said she felt the absence of models for writing fiction...
Literary responses
Toni Morrison
Sarah Blackburn
, who now suspected The Bluest Eye of having been over-praised, nevertheless celebrated TM
as someone who really knows how to clank a sentence, and whose dialogue is so compressed and life-like that...
Literary responses
Toni Morrison
Meanwhile, Jerry H. Bryant
in the Nation perceived in Sula (along with Ed Bullins
's The Reluctant Rapist and Walker
's In Love & Trouble) something entirely unprecedented in black writing—a fierceness bordering...
Literary responses
Tillie Olsen
Ann or Annie Hershey
's film, Tillie Olsen—A Heart in Action, gathers a number of tributes to her and to the lasting effects of her work from her feminist peers, figures like Gloria Steinem
Literary responses
Buchi Emecheta
Reviewers were very positive in journals such as the Guardian and the Sunday Times, and BE
was invited to make a television appearance. The Times Literary Supplement invited her to write an article on...
Literary responses
Bessie Head
Alice Walker
has frequently mentioned BH
as a vital influence on her writing.
Eilersen, Gillian Stead. Bessie Head. Wits University Press, 2007.
298
Many publications, both selections from and commentary on her writings, attest to her continuing influence. Helen Oyeyemi
wrote an introduction to...
Literary responses
Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching Godgenerally well received by white critics, including a reviewer for the New York Times who declared it a well nigh perfect story. On the other hand the leading black literary...
Literary responses
Zora Neale Hurston
The research and writing of African-American author Alice Walker
has been vital to the posthumous recuperation of ZNH
's life's work.
Timeline
1934
US feminist and writer Agnes Smedley
, a supporter of Communist
forces in China, published China's Red Army Marches, an account of the organization and growth of the Red Army
's campaign against the Kuomintang.
12 February 1980
US poet Muriel Rukeyser
died in Greenwich Village, New York, two years after publishing her Collected Poems and four years after her last new collection, The Gates, 1976.