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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 WALKER | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A portrait of the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer draws on letters, journals, and interviews to discuss her birth into a family of Georgia sharecroppers, her activism during the 1960s, and her literary achievements.
Author Notes
Evelyn C. White's articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including Smithsonian, Essence, Ms., the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Washington Post. White holds degrees from Harvard University, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and Wellesley College. A visiting scholar at Mills College in Oakland, California, she lives in the San Francisco Bay area and western Canada
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this vibrant narrative, White strives to go beyond simply mapping the movements and accomplishments of the first black female Pulitzer Prize winner. While White relies heavily on interviews with Alice Walker (b. 1944), her family and friends, the stories are always told in a historical context. Walker's childhood as a daughter of Georgia sharecroppers is framed by what it meant to be a poor black female in the Jim Crow South. White particularly focuses on an accident that transforms the eight-year-old Walker from talkative and precocious to introverted and sad. Walker was shot with a BB gun and left disfigured and blind in one eye, and her father was refused a ride to transport the injured girl into town and swindled out of $250 by a white doctor. These events, according to White, brought the young Walker to a new level of understanding of the inhumanity of Southern racism and later moved her to search and reveal, through her writings, the depths of human suffering. This understanding also drove Walker to become active in various causes, most notably the Civil Rights and black feminist movements. From beginning to end, White (The Black Women's Health Book), in her first biography, meticulously traces and analyzes the stages of Walker's life, emphasizing the impact on and importance of her literature in American culture. Agent, Faith Childs. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Walker's probing writing and serene manner have been a fixture on the literary scene for decades. White traces the roots of that serenity and probing spirit in this penetrating look at a woman who rose from a family of Georgia sharecroppers to an esteemed career in literature. A childhood accident blinded Walker in one eye, setting her on an approach to a life of close observation. Stifled by the rigidity of Spellman, Walker moved on to Sarah Lawrence, and eventually became a civil rights volunteer in the cauldron of racial tension that was Mississippi in the 1960s. Drawing on interviews with Walker, her family, friends, lovers, and colleagues, White chronicles Walker's illegal abortion, interracial marriage, bisexual and multiracial relationships, abiding championing of women's causes, and support of black women writers, notably Zora Neale Hurston. Walker paid a personal and professional price for eschewing the orthodoxy of race and sex, primarily following the uproar attending the publication of The Color Purple0 . Admirers of Alice Walker's honesty, integrity, and talent will love this book. --Vanessa Bush Copyright 2004 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Authorized, immensely supportive and informative, though very premature account of the political life and times of The Color Purple author, still vibrant at age 60. The last of numerous children in a family of Georgia sharecroppers, Alice Walker grew up amid the lingering, vicious legacy of slavery: poverty, ignorance, Jim Crow, violence, and hatred within her own family. Despite a BB-gun accident at age eight that left her blind in the right eye, Walker proved a tenacious, truth-seeking student and in 1961 secured a scholarship to Spelman College, a school for black women in Atlanta. The civil-rights movement was in full bloom, and Walker was inching restlessly into political activism and writing; she finished her BA at Sarah Lawrence under the tutelage of poet Muriel Rukeyser, who with agent Monica McCall and fellow poet Langston Hughes helped launch Walker's first writing efforts. Marriage to a white Jewish NAACP lawyer forcibly made her personal life public, especially after they moved to Mississippi. In her poetry and novels and as an early editor of Ms. magazine, Walker continued to court controversy by confronting headlong such feminist and humanist issues of the day as black male oppression of black women and genital mutilation. White, who has written several self-help books for African-American women, is clearly a Walker disciple; having been granted numerous interviews with major players, she presents a shapely life from the outside looking in, offering thorough instruction in African-American history, writing, and politics along the way. (For example, in her stress on Walker's instrumental work in resurrecting the writing of Zora Neale Hurston.) The culmination of this account, of course, is the stunning success of The Color Purple, which in 1982 made Walker the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize and went on to become a major Hollywood movie directed by Steven Spielberg. A bodacious hagiography that intelligently fills in details around the movements of early feminism, civil rights, and African-American arts. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The Color Purple gave Alice Walker her greatest acclaim (and a Pulitzer Prize), but the novel and its movie adaptation were not without controversy. Walker was attacked for portraying black men negatively, writing in dialect, and focusing on lesbianism. In this inspiring biography, journalist White (Chain Chain Change) covers every facet of Walker's life, which began in poverty in segregated Georgia with her seven siblings and sharecropper parents. Walker faced major discrimination in the South, but she survived Jim Crow, suicidal depression, interracial relationships, and an illegal abortion. She was active in the Civil Rights Movement, risking her life as a freedom fighter, and refused to conform to society's expectations; she married a white man (and was labeled a race traitor), then divorced him and came out as a bisexual. White has presented a superb study of an important and popular writer, though she devotes too much time to the now-dated controversy surrounding Walker's most celebrated book. Nevertheless, this first biography of Walker is highly recommended for African American and women's studies collections. Ann Burns, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Prologue: In Service | p. xiii |
| Part 1 Kudzu | |
| 1 Georgia, the Whole Day Through | p. 3 |
| 2 Babies and Stumps | p. 9 |
| 3 Roots | p. 16 |
| 4 "Shift for Self" | p. 23 |
| 5 Booker T. | p. 29 |
| 6 "I Been Cryin'..." | p. 33 |
| 7 Knights in Shining Armor | p. 41 |
| 8 A Long Walk | p. 49 |
| 9 Order My Steps | p. 56 |
| 10 Nobody in Atlanta | p. 66 |
| 11 Forbidden Things | p. 78 |
| 12 Fit for Myself to Know | p. 85 |
| Part 2 To Have and to Hold | |
| 13 Make Yourself Useful | p. 99 |
| 14 Reclaimed | p. 108 |
| 15 New York | p. 121 |
| 16 Live or Die | p. 132 |
| 17 In a Biblical Way | p. 139 |
| 18 Tulips | p. 147 |
| 19 Beyond Daily Bread | p. 155 |
| 20 That Alice? | p. 160 |
| 21 Nude | p. 170 |
| 22 Watered with Blood | p. 180 |
| 23 "Conformity is not Community" | p. 185 |
| 24 The Children Grow in Love | p. 199 |
| 25 A Kindred Lover of Beauty | p. 206 |
| 26 A Kiss on Both Sides | p. 215 |
| 27 Love the Questions | p. 225 |
| 28 Good Night, Willie Lee | p. 239 |
| 29 We Are a People | p. 245 |
| 30 Changes | p. 260 |
| 31 How Rare We Were | p. 267 |
| 32 We Were a Part of It | p. 276 |
| Part 3 Life Is the Award | |
| 33 Meridian | p. 285 |
| 34 Refuge | p. 294 |
| 35 Correct Relationship | p. 301 |
| 36 Country People | p. 308 |
| 37 An Ugly One at That | p. 313 |
| 38 A Room to Move Into | p. 326 |
| 39 Radically Brilliant | p. 334 |
| 40 At a Double Remove | p. 340 |
| 41 God Love All Them Feelings | p. 346 |
| 42 The Balance Had Begun to Tilt | p. 352 |
| 43 Some of Our Work | p. 358 |
| 44 Through It All | p. 362 |
| 45 I Try to Make Sense | p. 370 |
| 46 The Glimpse of Life beyond the Words | p. 383 |
| 47 Something to Life Spirits | p. 392 |
| 48 Guide and Protect | p. 400 |
| 49 More Than Many Hoped | p. 416 |
| 50 She Liked Everything She Saw | p. 423 |
| 51 The World Is Held Together | p. 428 |
| 52 They Saw the Airplane Coming | p. 438 |
| Epilogue: It's All Love | p. 455 |
| Chronology | p. 465 |
| Alice Walker Publications List | p. 468 |
| Wild Trees Press Publications List | p. 470 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 471 |
| Source Notes | p. 475 |
| Selected Bibliography | p. 514 |
| Permissions | p. 520 |
| Photo Credits | p. 522 |
| Index | p. 525 |
