Disability History Month Facts: Thursday, October 8, 2015: ALICE WALKER: Author of The Color Purple (1944 – present)

Disability History Month Facts: Thursday, October 8, 2015:

ALICE WALKER: Author of The Color Purple (1944 – present)

 

Alice Walker, author of the famed Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple, is an African-American woman who grew up on a sharecropper farm in Georgia under strict Jim Crow laws. Inspired by tales from her storytelling grandfather, Walker started writing at the age of 8; her parents were strong advocates of education and started her in school when she was just four years old.

 

When Walker was a child, she was injured in one eye from a BB gun shot fired by her brother. Because her parents had no car, it was a week before they could get her to a doctor, and by that time she had completely lost vision in that eye. Because of the scar tissue that had grown over her eye, Walker felt self-conscious and shy and chose to spend most of her time alone. That solitude, she says, is what led her to discover writing as her passion.

 

Upon graduation from high school, Walker received a college scholarship and became actively involved in the growing Civil Rights movement. Her first book, a collection of poetry titled Once, was published in 1968, and her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, was published in 1970. The Color Purple, published in 1982, received both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award and in 1985 was made into a movie directed by Steven Spielberg; the movie received 11 Academy Award nominations.

 

Attributions:

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Walker

World Biography: http://www.notablebiographies.com/Tu-We/Walker-Alice.html

Poem Hunter: http://www.poemhunter.com/alice-walker/biography/