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.
Photograph of Alice Walker, standing behind a podium and speaking into a microphone. She is wearing a blue jacket, dangling leaf-shaped earrings, and wire-rimmed glasses.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Anthologization Maud Sulter
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 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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

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.

Texts

Walker, Alice. “’Outlaw, Renegade, Rebel, Pagan’: Interview with Amy Goodman from <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘j’>Democracy Now!</span> (2006)”. The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker, edited by Rudolph P. Byrd, The New Press, 2010, pp. 268-79.
Walker, Alice. “11th Annual Steve Biko Lecture”. Facebook.
Walker, Alice. “A Conversation with David Swick from <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘j’>Shambhala Sun</span> (2006)”. The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker, edited by Rudolph P. Byrd, The New Press, 2010, pp. 301-10.
Walker, Alice. Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth. Random House, 2003.
Walker, Alice, and Margo Jefferson. “Alice Walker and Margo Jefferson: A Conversation from LIVE from the NYPL (2005)”. The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker, edited by Rudolph P. Byrd, The New Press, 2010, pp. 237-67.
Walker, Alice. Alice Walker. The Official Website. http://alicewalkersgarden.com/, http://alicewalkersgarden.com/.
Walker, Alice. “Alice Walker: Why I’m sailing to Gaza”. Sabbah Report.
Walker, Alice. Anything We Love Can Be Saved. Random House, 1997.
Walker, Alice. By the Light of My Father’s Smile. Random House, 1998.
Walker, Alice. Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning: Poems. Dial Press, 1979.
Walker, Alice. Hard Times Require Furious Dancing. New World Library, 2010.
Walker, Alice. Her Blue Body Everything We Know. Women’s Press, 1991.
Walker, Alice. Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful: Poems. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
Hurston, Zora Neale. I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. Editor Walker, Alice, The Feminist Press, 1979.
Walker, Alice. In Love and Trouble. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973.
Walker, Alice. In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.
Walker, Alice. Langston Hughes, American Poet. Crowell, 1974.
Walker, Alice. Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973-1987. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1988.
Walker, Alice. Meridian. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976.
Walker, Alice. Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart. Random House, 2004.
Walker, Alice. Once: Poems. Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968.
Walker, Alice. Overcoming Speechlessness: a Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Palestine/Israel. Seven Stories Press, 2010.
Walker, Alice. Possessing the Secret of Joy. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992.
Walker, Alice. Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.
Walker, Alice. Sent By Earth. Seven Stories, 2001.