| Birth Name Alice Walker | Date of Birth 9 February 1944 | Birth Town Putnam County, Georgia, United States of America |
Alice Walker is many things, but first, she is a creative and widely recognised novelist and poet. She was born on February 9, 1944. Alice is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. She is an African-American woman who has used her words and books to create impact. Some of her works address racism, gender discrimination, and others.
| National Inheritance |
The writer was born in Eastern Georgia as the youngest daughter of sharecropper parents. They were eight children and her mother worked as a maid to support the family. Alice grew up in a poor background. She watched and understood her parents suffering from poverty and discrimination. She always hoped in her heart that one day she could help them. Alice started her education when she was 4 years old at East Putnam Consolidated.
At the age of 8, Alice had a childhood accident. She was shot in the eyes with a BB pellet while playing a game with her brothers. Her family could not get Alice immediate medical attention because they had no vehicle. When she finally got medical help, it was too late and Alice’s right eye became permanently blinded. A whitish scar tissue formed on the blinded eye and this visible mark made Alice self-conscious. She was jeered at by some children.
The incident made Alice withdraw from people and become ashamed because she thought she was disfigured. During that time she was also spontaneously aggressive, yet timid and shy. This was when Alice found solace in reading and writing. She took an interest in poetry, essays, and stories. By the time she was 14, the scar tissue was removed, but the mark remained.
The schools in the South were segregated, so Alice attended a high school available for only black children. She excelled in school and graduated as a class valedictorian. She got a scholarship from the State of Georgia to attend Spelman College in Atlanta. Not long after enrolling in Spelman she switched to Sarah Lawrence College in New York on another scholarship.
Alice became pregnant in her senior year and opted for an abortion. This disrupted Alice’s life for a while and she went through a time of suicidal thoughts. When she recovered, Alice wrote the poem Once. It was her first poetry collection. After her graduation from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965, the writer published her first short story.
Alice became involved in the civil rights movement. She is an activist, feminist, and pacifist. She previously married a Jewish civil rights lawyer, Melvyn Leventhal in 1967. This made them the first married interracial couple in Mississippi and brought further discrimination from whites and the Ku Klux Clan. Although, she divorced Melvyn in 1976; they had a daughter together. Alice is known for her best-selling novel The Color Purple. She has garnered several awards such as the Pulitzer awards, National Book Award for Fiction, O’Henry Award, and much more. Her work includes Meridian, You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down, and To Hell With Dying.
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