Alice Walker Biography

Alice Walker was born on February ninth 1944, the youngest of eight children raised by Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant. As a child Alice's parents worked hard, her mother worked for eleven hours for $17 per week. When walker was young her mother defended her kids from working in other peoples fields by saying "You might have some black children somewhere, but they don’t live in this house. Don’t you ever come around here again talking about how my children don’t need to learn how to read and write." Minnie enrolled alice in first grade when she was four.

When alice was eight she was accidentally shot in the right eye by a BB gun one of her brothers had owned. Because no one in the family had a car Walker couldn't see a for a week but by then her eye had already scarred over leave a white scar over her eye, which made her very self-conscious and shy, thinking that she was disfigured. But, due to her being more self involved she began writing, something that she began to enjoy very much.

After picking up writing Walker began taking her studies more seriously and took a trip to Africa as a part of a study abroad program. Walker graduated from her segregated high school in 1965 as valedictorian. After graduating she worked as a social worker and continued to write stories and having a few published, but her break came with the publication of "The Color Purple" which won her a pulitzer prize and a national book award for fiction.

Although Walker enjoys writing she claims for her real purpose to be activism. Alice met and marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for civil rights in the 1960s. In 2003 she was arrested with two other authors for crossing a police line during an anti war protest outside the white house, saying "I was with other women who believe that the women and children of Iraq are just as dear as the women and children in our families, and that, in fact, we are one