Gifts For Mothers Biography
(Source google.com)
Born in Eatonton Georgia , on February the 9th, 1944,
just before the end of World War Two, Alice Malsenior Walker was the eighth of
eight children to Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker and Winnie Lee Walker. Walker
was a confident girl until 1952, when a freak accident involving a BB gun left
her blinded her in one eye. Although her older brother, who shot her during a
heated game of Cowboys and Indians, offered to pay for an operation to correct
the impairment, Walker
would never fully recover the sight of her right eye. From then on, she became
secluded and reserved, she dreamed of suicide, but at the same time found
solace in writing – poetry, short stories – and became an observer rather than
a participator in everyday life. Despite the damage to her eye, and the life she led as a
hermit in the years that followed, Walker
graduated high school and left for Spelman
College , Atlanta , Georgia
in 1961. On leaving, her mother gave her three special gifts: a suitcase for travelling
the world, a typewriter for creativity, and a sewing machine for
self-sufficiency.
In 1963, Walker left Spelman
for Sarah Lawrence College ,
a place housing only a handful of African American people, most of them men.
This was not before participating in many civil rights demonstrations and
meeting Martin Luther King at his home in recognition of her invitation to the
Youth World Peace Festival in Finland . 1964 was the turning point for Ms. Alice Walker. Realising
that she was pregnant she contemplated suicide and slept with her razor under
her pillow for three nights. During the same week, Walker again turned to writing as a natural
outlet for her distress. She stopped writing only to eat and sleep. Thankfully,
through the help of a friend, Walker was able to attain a safe abortion. The end product of weeks of anguish was, among other things,
a story entitled To Hell with Dying and with the help of teacher Muriel
Ruykeyser this was published in 1965. Moving to New York City in November of the same year Walker
worked for the welfare system. She soon moved back however and in 1966 fell in
love with civil rights lawyer Melvyn Laventhal. They married the following
year, despite pressure from neighbouring citizens over their inter-racial
marriage, the only one in Mississippi, where Mel and Alice Laventhal were to
live.
In the same year that Martin Luther King died for the civil
rights movement Alice Laventhal became pregnant but lost it due to
complications. In her desperation she wrote and published Once, her first book,
in 1968. The poet again became pregnant and in the same week as The Third Life
of Grange Copeland was published – her novel about three generations of
domestic violence – daughter Rebecca was born. From there, she took a position as writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College
and then in 1972 became a teacher at Wellesley
College , and began one of
the first "Gender Studies" classes in the nation. In searching for
course material Walker
came across the work of Zora Neale Hurston and the inspired Alice Laventhal
began writing and has never stopped since. In 1973 she published In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black
Women and her second book of poetry Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems. She
then wrote and published a children’s book Langston Hughes; American Poet and
briefly became editor of Feminist publication Ms. magazine. Soon after Walker was to split with her husband. She
retained her maiden name, falling in love with fellow editor Robert Allen –
ofBlack Scholar – and published Meridian to universal acclaim. Walker’s next
project was another book of short stories: You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down,
which only received a lukewarm response.
Nothing however prepared the critics for Alice Walker’s
Pulitizer Prize winning novel The Color Purple. The story chronicles the life
of a black African American girl called Celie, growing up in the Deep South.
The novel was later made into a feature-length motion picture, directed by
Steven Spielberg and in turn shot Alice Walker to overnight literary success.
The novel was severely criticised however, mostly for its representation of the
character of saw to symbolise the whole
of the black male race – wife beating, stubborn and by the end foolish and
incompetent. In response Walker published her autobiography In Search of
Our Mother’s Gardens in 1983 and her attitudes towards the female circumcision
rituals in Africa led her to co-produce the shocking documentary Warrior Marks
with Pratibha Parmar.
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