Front cover image for Alice Walker : a life

Alice Walker : a life

Evelyn C. White (Author)
"Born to a sharecropping family in Georgia, Alice Walker thrived in the rich culture of what she called the "agrarian peasantry" to become one of our most important and popular writers. Evelyn C. White charts Walker's childhood, marked by an incident at eight that left her blinded in her right eye and with disfiguring scar tissue and that prompted her, out of a sense of "ugliness," to probe human suffering through her poems and stories. In this biography, we learn of Walker's activism in the 1960s freedom movement, and her leadership in the debate on black women's art, politics, and sexuality. The Color Purple garnered Walker the Pulitzer Prize in fiction - the first awarded to a black woman writer. Drawing on papers, letters, journals, and extensive interviews with Walker, her family, friends, colleagues, and leading American cultural figures including Gloria Steinem, Quincy Jones, and Oprah Winfrey, White assesses one of the most influential writers of our time."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 2004
First edition View all formats and editions
W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2004
Biography
xv, 538 pages, 8 unnumbered leaves of plates ; 25 cm
9780393058918, 9780393328264, 0393058913, 0393328260
55286230
Prologue : in service
pt. 1. Kudzu
1. Georgia, the whole day through
2. Babies and stumps
3. Roots
4. "Shift for self"
5. Booker T
6. "I been cryin' ..."
7. Knights in shining armor
8. A long walk
9. Order my steps
10. Nobody in Atlanta
11. Forbidden things
12. Fit for myself to know
pt. 2. To have and to hold
13. Make yourself useful
14. Reclaimed
15. New York
16. Live or die
17. In a biblical way
18. Tulips
19. Beyond daily bread
20. That Alice?
21. Nude
22. Watered with blood
23. "Conformity is not community"
24. The children grow in love
25. A kindred lover of beauty
26. A kiss on both sides
27. Love the questions
28. Good night, Willie Lee
29. We are a people
30. Changes
31. How rare we were
32. We were a part of it
pt. 3. Life is the award
33. Meridian
34. Refuge
35. Correct relationship
36. Country people
37. An ugly one at that
38. A room to move into
39. Radically brilliant
40. At a double remove
41. God love all them feelings
42. The balance had begun to tilt
43. Some of our work
44. Through it all
45. I try to make sense
46. The glimpse of life beyond the words
47. Something to life spirits
48. Guide and protect
49. More than many hoped
50. She liked everything she saw
51. The world is held together
52. They saw the airplane coming
Epilogue : it's all love
Chronology