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
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.
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...
Reception Zora Neale Hurston
Writer Alice Walker placed a tombstone over the approximate location of ZNH 's grave in Florida. Taken from a poem by Jean Toomer , the epitaph reads A Genius of the South.
Walker, Alice. In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
94, 107
Commire, Anne, and Deborah Klezmer, editors. Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Yorkin Publications.
7: 598
Textual Production Zora Neale Hurston
Alice Walker selected and edited I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Publishing Bessie Head
In September 1974 BH was delighted to receive a letter from Alice Walker , in her capacity as an editor of Ms magazine, to solicit a story. Head sent off a selection, from which Walker...
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.
298
Many publications, both selections from and commentary on her writings, attest to her continuing influence. Helen Oyeyemi wrote an introduction to...
Textual Features Monica Furlong
The different spiritual traditions represented here include ancient Greeks, medieval Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Australian Aboriginals and Native Americans. The authors of prayers include Teresa of Avila , Emily Dickinson , Denise Levertov , Oodgeroo Noonuccal , and Alice Walker .
Blackwell’s Online Bookshop. http://Bookshop.Blackwell.co.uk.
Textual Production Zoë Fairbairns
The preface says that the volume does not pretend to offer answers or solutions. Nor does it attempt to promote a particular political position.
Ebersole, Lucinda, and Richard Peabody. “Preface”. Coming to Terms: A Literary Response to Abortion, edited by Lucinda Ebersole and Richard Peabody, The New Press, p. xiii - xiv.
xiii-xiv
It includes a diverse array of writers including Alice Walker
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...

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.