Walker, Alice

Impact on the world

Published 'The Color Purple' in 1982, becoming the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year and also winning the National Book Award, a rare double honor matched by only a handful of authors; the novel has been adapted into a 1985 Steven Spielberg film, a Broadway musical, and a 2023 film of the musical.

Life & background

The eighth child of Georgia sharecroppers, Walker was raised without indoor plumbing or electricity and was accidentally blinded in one eye as a child by a sibling's BB gun, an injury that led her mother to give her a typewriter, sparing her from chores and turning her toward writing. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965, she became involved in the civil rights movement and married civil rights lawyer Melvyn Leventhal months before the Supreme Court struck down state bans on interracial marriage, making theirs reportedly the first legally recognized interracial marriage in Mississippi. Her 1982 epistolary novel 'The Color Purple,' chronicling an abused, uneducated Black woman's path to empowerment in early 20th-century Georgia, won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Walker the first African American woman to win the award, and also won the National Book Award the same year. The novel drew both acclaim for its female characters and controversy from some Black critics over its depiction of Black men; Walker also coined the term 'womanist' in 1983 to describe a Black feminist perspective uniting race, class, and gender concerns.

Sources

1. The Color Purple); Encyclopædia Britannica; Essence; PBS American Masters