Alice Walker Biography

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Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American author and activist. She wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. ------------------------------------------------- Early life Walker was born in Putnam County, Georgia,[4] the youngest of eight children, to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant. Her father, who was, in her words, "wonderful at math but a terrible farmer," earned only $300 ($4,000 in 2013 dollars) a year from sharecropping and dairy farming. Her mother supplemented the family income by working as a maid.[5] She worked 11 hours a day for $17 per week to help pay for Alice to attend college.[6] Living under Jim Crow laws, Walker's parents resisted landlords who expected the children of black sharecroppers to work the fields at a young age. A white plantation owner said to her that black people had "no need for education". Minnie Lou Walker, according to her daughter, replied "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 howmy children don't need to learn how to read and write." Her mother enrolled Alice in first grade when the girl was four years old.[7] Growing up with an oral tradition, listening to stories from her grandfather (who was the model for the character of Mr. in The Color Purple), Walker began writing, very privately, when she was eight years old. "With my family, I had to hide things," she said. "And I had to keep a lot in my mind."[8] In 1952, Walker was accidentally wounded in the right eye by a shot from a BB gun fired by one of her brothers.[9] In 2013, on BBC Radio's Desert Island Discs, she said the act was actually deliberate but she agreed to protect her brother against their parents' anger if they knew the truth.

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