Alice Walker
1 book analyzed
Biography
Alice Walker was born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia — the eighth child of sharecroppers — in a world not far removed from the Georgia of the novel. At eight, a BB gun accident blinded her right eye; the resulting scar tissue, and the self-consciousness it caused, fed directly into Celie's sense of ugliness. Walker attended Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence, worked in the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, married a white civil rights lawyer and later described the social hostility they faced. She was the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for The Color Purple in 1983. Her relationship with Zora Neale Hurston is formative: Walker found Hurston's unmarked grave in Florida, paid for a headstone, and spent years championing the rediscovery of Their Eyes Were Watching God — a novel Walker openly acknowledged as the spiritual predecessor of The Color Purple. Walker's own sexuality (she later identified as bisexual) inflects the Celie-Shug relationship, which Walker has described as drawn from real emotional experience.