NOTE: This is a biography I wrote on Alice Walker for a gr. 12 English assignment. I worked hard on this so please don't be tempted to copy it. You may quote it by inclosing the proper information. (ie. author (me), url, etc.). Thanks:)
As a poet, Alice Walker tries to use as few words as possible. Not wanting to add the word "black" to describe something, she chose a word from her own culture to describe a "black feminist". In the African-American culture, if a girl is acting "womanish", she says what is on her mind (Galvin 29). Therefore, a "black feminist" is a womanist (Kramer 82), "commited to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female (Galvin 29)". Alice Malsenior Walker is a survivor, a womanist writer and an activist, who, through her work, touched the hearts of many.
Alice was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children (Kramer 13). Her parents, Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker and Willie Lee Walker were poor sharecroppers but wealthy of spirit and love (Jackson). The family moved often and their housing was always small shacks with leaky roofs that were cold in the winter and hot in the summer (Kramer 13-4). In the summer of 1952, while playing with two of her brothers, she was blinded in her right eye by a BB gun pellet (Jackson). Her eye was disfigured with a glob of white scar tissue and the confident little girl became a shy and lonely child (Kramer 20). When she was fourteen years old, one of her oldest brothers paid for surgery to have the scar removed (Kramer 23), but her vision never returned (Jackson). However, her earlier confidence began to return and she was no longer afraid to look people in the eye (Kramer 23). Her grades improved and when she graduated from high school, she was valedictorian of her class (Kramer 23-4) and prom queen that year (Jackson).
After graduating high school in 1961, she attended Spelman College in Atlanta on a scholarship. In her junior year she received a scholarship from Sarah Lawrence College, a prestigious university in New York, where she was one of a handful of African-Americans. In her senior year she realized she was pregnant. Frightened and not knowing how to tell her parents, she considered suicide and for a while slept with a razor blade under her pillow. However, with the help of a friend, she was able to have a safe abortion and slowly recovered from her depression and anxiety (Jackson). Therefore, no matter how hard Alice's life was, she found a way to survive through all obstacles.
more to come soon.....
© 1997 sweetz32@hotmail.com
Get your own Free Home Page