Alice Walker

Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. She was the eighth child of Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker who were sharecroppers. When Walker was eight years old one of her older brothers shot her in the eye with a BB gun by accident blinding her. Alice Walker was very intelligent in school. She graduated high school as a valedictorian and with a rehabilitation scholarship was able to go to college in 1961.

She received her bachelor of arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965. Walker became very interested in the U.S. civil rights movement and has spoken for the woman's movement, the anti-apartheid movement and against female genital mutilation. She also participated in voter registration drives, campaigns for welfare rights and children's programs in Mississippi. Later in 19 65, Walker met and later married Mel Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. They became the first legally married inter-racial couple in Mississippi.

Their relationship wasn't welcome which resulted in them being harassed and getting murderous threats from the Ku Klux Klan. The couple had a daughter named Rebecca in 1969, who also became an author. They divorced nine years after her birth. Walker's first book of poetry was written when she was still in college but stopped temporally from writing when she was in Mississippi working in the civil rights movement. She continued writing when she joined Ms. Magazine as an editor in the late 1970's.

Walker wrote several novels. Her first work of fiction The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), her second novel Meridian (1983) and her best-known work The Color Purple (1982). In 1983, The Color Purple won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Fiction making Walker the first African-American woman to win. Walker now lives in Northern California with her dog, Marley.