Alice Walker Influences

Alice Walker is a cosmopolitan and famous writer of our times despite being raised in an under-privileged environment. Despite poverty, discrimination in the face of Jim Crow laws and threats from the Ku Klux Klan, the Walkers saw to it that their children attended school. (Horsley, “Alice Walker”) While attending Sarah Lawrence College in New York City, Walker studied abroad to Africa where later that year she published her first story. Upon graduation, Walker began being active with the civil rights movement as well as becoming a teacher, lecturer, and social worker. In 1962, Walker was invited to the home of Martin Luther King Jr. in recognition of her attendance at the Youth World Peace Festival in Finland. (Whitted,” Alice Walker (b. 1944)."
This novel is Walker’s most popular work and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983. This novel was later turned into a film and in 2005 made into a Broadway play. Walker's literary influences include Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer, black Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks, South African novelist Bessie Head, and white Georgia writer Flannery O'Connor. Additionally, Walker's creative vision is rooted in the economic hardship, racial terror, and folk wisdom of African American life and culture, particularly in the rural South. Although Alice Walker was raised in under privileged and suffered a tragic incident as a youth, Walker was still able to make a name for herself at an early age. In reference to the pieces of literature that she has created, all have a connection to her personal life. In the short story Everyday Use, Walker is able to connect with her characters to a point where her readers can take a glimpse of her personal
For example, in her short story Everyday Use, both Alice Walker and Maggie suffered from an injury during their childhood. Whitted states that, “The precocious spirit that distinguished Walker's personality during her early years vanished at the age of eight, when her brother scarred and blinded her right eye with a BB gun in a game of cowboys and Indians.” ( “Alice Walker”(b.1944)) The incident caused Walker to become self-conscious of her appearance and focus on her writing and poetry. In the case of the character Maggie, according to Everyday Use, Walker states, “Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie’s arms sticking to me, her hair smoking and her dress falling off her in little black papery flakes. Her eyes seemed stretched open, blazed open by the flames that reflected in them.” Maggie’s incident affected the way she perceived herself as well as changing others judgement towards her. Both Walker and Maggie suffered from traumatic physical injuries which resulted in social consequences as well as self-esteem issues. Walker and Maggie injuries affected their lives into adult for greater self-actualization. For example, although Walker suffered an injury at youth, without the injury her writing career may have been altered. There are other