I have done a little research and here comes some information about the author of The Color Purple I hope some of you might find interesting...
About Alice Walker: some biographical notes
Childhood and Youth
Alice Malsenior Walker was born in 1944 into a family of sharecroppers in the small town of Eatonton, Georgia, as the youngest of eight children. Her father organized the first black voters in the county and her parents helped build a one-room school for their children. Her mother picked cotton and worked as a maid. She loved sewing quilts as Alice did, too. At the age of four, Alice defied the landowner and escaped field work by going to school. When Alice was eight, her brother accidentally shot her in the eye while playing with a pellet gun. A white motorist passing by refused to stop and so her right eye was already blind when she reached a doctor. It was six years later that she could see again with both eyes.
Though her parents weren’t violent people, the community her family lived in was struck by violence and Walker wanted to understand all the shootings and beatings of women and children around her. Walker adored her grandparents but was aware of their past: her grandmother was beaten by her husband and her grandmother Kate was shot down by an “admirer” in a churchyard and died in the arms of Walker’s then 11-year old father.
Civil Rights Movement
In 1961, Walker took up a scholarship to Spelman College in Atlanta which is an institution for black women founded by white philanthropists. The women had to learn certain social norms and desirable behaviour there.“How they poured tea was more important than the books they read”, said Russian historian Howard Zinn, Walker’s mentor at that time. But Walker preferred to break the rules and dated with white students and joined the growing sit-ins and pickets on and off campus. When Zinn was fired for “insubordination” for backing student’s demands, Walker transferred to a liberal arts college in New York where she graduated in 1965.
Walker witnessed Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech in Washington DC in 1963 and later wrote that “my life, like that of millions of black young southerners, seemed to find its beginning and purpose at the precise moment I first heard him speak”. She decided to work for voter registration in Mississippi, the most repressive state in the southern USA. She met Mel Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer and married him in 1967 when interracial relationships were still illegal. They lived together for seven years in Jackson, Mississippi as the first openly interracial couple in that state. Walker worked to desegregate schools. The moment when Walker heard of the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, she miscarried. But the next year she gave birth to Rebecca, a “movement child”. Her marriage to Leventhal came under pressure from the Ku Klux Klan as well as from black nationalists who saw him as an “interloper”.
The 80s until today
After they had moved to New York the couple divorced in 1976 and their daughter spending alternate years with them. Her relationship to her daughter continues to be difficult. Together with others Walker founded The Sisterhood, a group of women writers. She worked as a contributing editor for Ms Magazine run by Gloria Steinem. In 1978 Walker moved to California and started the Wild Trees Press together with her partner Robert Allen.
In the mid-90s Walker had a crisis when she was hit by her mother’s death and the end of her relationship with Allen. She suffered from undiagnosed Lyme disease, a tick-borne infection that can precede arthritis. At that time she also acknowledged her bisexuality and had a love affair with the singer Tracy Chapman. Walker engages against female genital mutilation, against the Cuban trade embargo and is helping women who are fleeing family violence. She was arrested at a protest against the war in Iraq.
Controversy around The Color Purple
In 1983 Alice Walker became the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer price and win the National Book Awards for fiction. Her book The Color Purple as well as the movie adaption by Stephen Spielberg provoked controversy. There was fury and indignation among parts of the black communities. Alice Walker recalls later: “I was called ‘liar’ and ‘whore’ and ‘traitor’ for no other reason than that people who have been made to depend on the approval of the powerful grow afraid of criticising themselves because the powerful may hear.”
When the movie by Spielberg came to the cinemas (which was criticized by Walker, too, but for other reasons), it was criticized by Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam and film director Spike Lee. As The Color Purple was nominated for 11 Oscars, a Coalition against Black Exploitation picketed the Oscars. For Walker it was “very painful to have people say I didn't like black men, when I'd spent so much time trying to understand them. My grandfathers were terrible but became doting, indulgent, sweet old men. I wanted to know what changed them.” Walker remembers the struggle to “speak up about violence among black people... at the same time that all black people (and some whites) - including me and my family - were enduring massive psychological and physical violence from white supremacists.”
Walker suspects that she was judged for her “lifestyle” as much as for her books – “both for her marriage to a white lawyer - and collaboration with white feminists - in an era of black nationalist separatism, and for her later avowed bisexuality,” as the Guardian puts it. The attacks continued for years and Walker was hurt very much. But later on she came to the conclusion: “I often thought that many of the men just wanted to be the subject … It's a book mostly about women, and what they're doing, and how they're carrying on no matter what the men are doing . . . I think that for many men at that time it was a shock that you could actually write a novel with women at the centre.”
About Alice Walker: some biographical notes
Childhood and Youth
Alice Malsenior Walker was born in 1944 into a family of sharecroppers in the small town of Eatonton, Georgia, as the youngest of eight children. Her father organized the first black voters in the county and her parents helped build a one-room school for their children. Her mother picked cotton and worked as a maid. She loved sewing quilts as Alice did, too. At the age of four, Alice defied the landowner and escaped field work by going to school. When Alice was eight, her brother accidentally shot her in the eye while playing with a pellet gun. A white motorist passing by refused to stop and so her right eye was already blind when she reached a doctor. It was six years later that she could see again with both eyes.
Though her parents weren’t violent people, the community her family lived in was struck by violence and Walker wanted to understand all the shootings and beatings of women and children around her. Walker adored her grandparents but was aware of their past: her grandmother was beaten by her husband and her grandmother Kate was shot down by an “admirer” in a churchyard and died in the arms of Walker’s then 11-year old father.
Civil Rights Movement
In 1961, Walker took up a scholarship to Spelman College in Atlanta which is an institution for black women founded by white philanthropists. The women had to learn certain social norms and desirable behaviour there.“How they poured tea was more important than the books they read”, said Russian historian Howard Zinn, Walker’s mentor at that time. But Walker preferred to break the rules and dated with white students and joined the growing sit-ins and pickets on and off campus. When Zinn was fired for “insubordination” for backing student’s demands, Walker transferred to a liberal arts college in New York where she graduated in 1965.
Walker witnessed Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech in Washington DC in 1963 and later wrote that “my life, like that of millions of black young southerners, seemed to find its beginning and purpose at the precise moment I first heard him speak”. She decided to work for voter registration in Mississippi, the most repressive state in the southern USA. She met Mel Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer and married him in 1967 when interracial relationships were still illegal. They lived together for seven years in Jackson, Mississippi as the first openly interracial couple in that state. Walker worked to desegregate schools. The moment when Walker heard of the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, she miscarried. But the next year she gave birth to Rebecca, a “movement child”. Her marriage to Leventhal came under pressure from the Ku Klux Klan as well as from black nationalists who saw him as an “interloper”.
The 80s until today
After they had moved to New York the couple divorced in 1976 and their daughter spending alternate years with them. Her relationship to her daughter continues to be difficult. Together with others Walker founded The Sisterhood, a group of women writers. She worked as a contributing editor for Ms Magazine run by Gloria Steinem. In 1978 Walker moved to California and started the Wild Trees Press together with her partner Robert Allen.
In the mid-90s Walker had a crisis when she was hit by her mother’s death and the end of her relationship with Allen. She suffered from undiagnosed Lyme disease, a tick-borne infection that can precede arthritis. At that time she also acknowledged her bisexuality and had a love affair with the singer Tracy Chapman. Walker engages against female genital mutilation, against the Cuban trade embargo and is helping women who are fleeing family violence. She was arrested at a protest against the war in Iraq.
Controversy around The Color Purple
In 1983 Alice Walker became the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer price and win the National Book Awards for fiction. Her book The Color Purple as well as the movie adaption by Stephen Spielberg provoked controversy. There was fury and indignation among parts of the black communities. Alice Walker recalls later: “I was called ‘liar’ and ‘whore’ and ‘traitor’ for no other reason than that people who have been made to depend on the approval of the powerful grow afraid of criticising themselves because the powerful may hear.”
When the movie by Spielberg came to the cinemas (which was criticized by Walker, too, but for other reasons), it was criticized by Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam and film director Spike Lee. As The Color Purple was nominated for 11 Oscars, a Coalition against Black Exploitation picketed the Oscars. For Walker it was “very painful to have people say I didn't like black men, when I'd spent so much time trying to understand them. My grandfathers were terrible but became doting, indulgent, sweet old men. I wanted to know what changed them.” Walker remembers the struggle to “speak up about violence among black people... at the same time that all black people (and some whites) - including me and my family - were enduring massive psychological and physical violence from white supremacists.”
Walker suspects that she was judged for her “lifestyle” as much as for her books – “both for her marriage to a white lawyer - and collaboration with white feminists - in an era of black nationalist separatism, and for her later avowed bisexuality,” as the Guardian puts it. The attacks continued for years and Walker was hurt very much. But later on she came to the conclusion: “I often thought that many of the men just wanted to be the subject … It's a book mostly about women, and what they're doing, and how they're carrying on no matter what the men are doing . . . I think that for many men at that time it was a shock that you could actually write a novel with women at the centre.”
Sources:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005...
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006...
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007...
http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013...