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
Reception Zora Neale Hurston
This made an early, vital contribution to the regeneration of ZNH 's literary status. In her essay collection In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), Walker writes movingly about Hurston's life's work, and...
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...
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...
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...
Travel Tillie Olsen
Apart from indefatigable travel around the USA (including Hawaii), TO visited London, Paris, and the USSR with her husband in 1980. In London she met the staff at Virago , her publisher...
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
Textual Production Winsome Pinnock
This was the first play that WP wrote, aged twenty-three. Though it is largely a play about women, it grew from interviews she did with veterans from the Falklands War, when she felt that the...
Reception Adrienne Rich
She accepted the award, together with fellow nominees Audre Lorde and Alice Walker , on behalf of all silenced women, and in their names gave away her prize.
Textual Production Michèle Roberts
The common thread among Women's Press publications was that most of the politicized novels demonstrate[d] an alliance with the women's movement, and blurred boundaries between theoretical and creative writing genres. The press's other authors included...
Textual Production Kamila Shamsie
Other contributors included Deborah Moggach , Gillian Slovo , and Alice Walker .
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 et al., Sheba Feminist Publishers, pp. 100-10.
100-10
Textual Features Maud Sulter
The exhibition was a large one. The first section, entitled Media Plays, (1984-88), critiques the ways in which Black people are represented in Western media and features enlarged newspaper photographs of Black athlete Ben Johnson
Publishing Maud Sulter
MS had approached Virago Press , a feminist publisher, but was told that they could not give her a decision about including her in their poetry series. They were awaiting the results of negotiations with...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Walker, Alice. The Chicken Chronicles. The New Press, 2011.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982.
Walker, Alice. The Cushion in the Road. The New Press, 2013.
Walker, Alice. The Same River Twice. Scribner, 1996.
Walker, Alice. The Temple of My Familiar. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanich, 1989.
Walker, Alice. The Third Life of Grange Copeland. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970.
Walker, Alice. The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart. Random House, 2000.
Walker, Alice. The World Will Follow Joy. The New Press, 2013.
Walker, Alice, and Pratibha Parmar. Warrior Marks. Harcourt Brace, 1993.
Walker, Alice. We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For. New Press, 2006.
Walker, Alice. You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1981.