Alice Walker

Alice Walker is an American novelist,short-story writer,poet,essayist,and activist.Her most famous novel,The Color Purple,was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983.Alice Walkers creative vision is rooted in the economic hardship,racial terrorism,and folk wisdom of African American life and culture,particularly in the rural South.Her writing explores multidimensional(多面的)kinship among women,among men and women,among humans and animals,and embraces the redemptive power of social,spiritual and political revolution.Brief IntroductionEarly LifeWalker was born in Eatonton,Georgia,the youngest of eight children,to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant.Her father,who was,in her words,wonderful at math but a terrible farmer,earned only$300 a year from sharecropping and dairy farming,while her mother supplemented the family income by working as a maid.Living under Jim Crow Laws,Walkers mother had struggles with landlords who expected the children of black sharecroppers to work the fields at a young age.When she was four years old,Alice was enrolled in the first grade,a year ahead of schedule.Growing up with an oral tradition,listening to stories from her grandfather(the model for the character for Mr.in The Color Purple),Walker was writingvery privatelysince she was eight years old.With my family,I had to hide things,she said.And I had to keep a lot in my mind.In 1952,Walker was accidentally wounded in the right eye by a shot from a BB gun fired by one of her brothers.Then she was permanently blind in that eye,felt like an outcast and she turned for solace to reading and to writing poetry.she subsequently became valedictorian（作告别演说者）and was voted most-popular girl,as well as queen of her senior class,she realized that her traumatic injury had some value:it allowed her to begin really to see people and things,really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out,as she has said.ActivismAlice Walker met Martin Luther King Jr.when she was a student at Spelman College in Atlanta in the early 1960s.Walker credits King for her decision to return to the American South as an activist for the Civil Rights Movement.She attended the famous 1963 March on Washington.As a young adult she volunteered her time registering voters in Georgia and Mississippi On March 8,2003,International Womens Day,on the eve of the Iraq War,Alice Walker,Maxine Hong Kingston,author of The Woman Warrior,and Terry Tempest Williams,author of An Unspoken Hunger were arrested along with 24 others for crossing a police line during an anti-war protest rally outside the White House.Walker wrote about the experience in her essay We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For.“In November 2008,Alice Walker wrote An Open Letter to Barack Obama that was published on The .In March 2009,Alice Walker traveled to Gaza along with a group of 60 other female activists from the anti-war group Code Pink,in response to the controversial Israeli offensive of December 2008-January 2009.The purpose of the trip was to deliver aid,to meet with NGOs and residents,and to persuade Israel and Egypt to open their borders into Gaza.She planned to visit Gaza again in December 2009 to participate in the Gaza Freedom MarchNovels and short story collectionsThe Third Life of Grange Copeland(1970)In Love and Trouble:Stories of Black Women(1973)Meridian(1976)The Color Purple(1982)You Cant Keep a Good Woman Down:Stories(1982)To Hell With Dying(1988)The Temple of My Familiar(1989)Finding the Green Stone(1991)Possessing the Secret of Joy(1992)The Complete Stories(1994)By The Light of My Fathers Smile(1998)The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart(2000)Now Is The Time to Open Your Heart(2005)Devils My Enemy(2008Poetry collectionsOnce(1968)Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems(1973)Good Night,Willie Lee,Ill See You in the Morning(1979)Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful(1985)Her Blue Body Everything We Know:Earthling Poems(1991)Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth(2003)A Poem Traveled Down My Arm:Poems And Drawings(2003)Collected Poems(2005)Poem at Thirty-NineNon-fictionIn Search of Our Mothers Gardens:Womanist Prose(1983)Living by the Word(1988)Warrior Marks(1993)The Same River Twice:Honoring the Difficult(1996)Anything We Love Can Be Saved:A Writers Activism(1997)Go Girl!:The Black Womans Book of Travel and Adventure(1997)Pema Chodron and Alice Walker in Conversation(1999)Sent By Earth:A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center and Pentagon(2001)We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For(2006)Mississippi Winter IVOvercoming Speechlessness(2010)Select awards and honorsPulitzer Prize for Fiction for Color Purple(1983)(first black woman).National Book Award(First black woman)O.Henry Award for Kindred Spirits 1985.Honorary Degree from the California Institute of the Arts(1995)American Humanist Association named her as Humanist of the Year(1997)The Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the ArtsThe Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts&LettersThe Radcliffe Institute Fellowship,the Merrill Fellowship,and a Guggenheim FellowshipThe Front Page Award for Best Magazine Criticism from the Newswomans Club of New YorkInduction to the California Hall of Fame in The California Museum for History,Women,and the Arts(2006)The Color Purple(1982)It received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award.It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name.Taking place mostly in rural Georgia,the story focuses on female black life during the 1930s in the Southern United States,addressing the numerous issues including their exceedingly low position in American social culture.The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000-2009 at number seventeen because of the sometimes explicit content,particularly in terms of violence.The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted(颁布)between 1876 and 1965.They mandated（批准）de jure（根据法律的）racial segregation in all public facilities,with a supposedly separate but equal status for black Americans.In reality,this led to treatment and accommodations that were usually inferior to those provided for white Americans,systematizing a number of economic,educational and social disadvantages.