The colorful life of Alice Walker

Writer Alice Walker introduced a new chapter in American literature with the publication of The Color Purple in 1982. With it, she became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The Color Purple is recognized as the first Black, queer, feminist novel to achieve commercial and critical success. Born to sharecroppers in rural Georgia in 1944, Walker was raised without indoor plumbing or electricity. After an accident left her blind in one eye, she turned to writing. She won scholarships to Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence, graduating from the latter in 1965. Walker spoke about having an illegal abortion as a poor, unmarried college student in the 1960s That decade Walker became involved in the civil rights movement. She married another civil rights activist, white Jewish lawyer Melvyn Leventhal, in New York months before the Supreme Court overturned state bans on interracial marriage, making theirs the first legal interracial marriage in Mississippi when they returned there. The couple had one child, before divorcing in 1976. She taught at Wellesley College and the University of Massachusetts in the 1970s. Walker published modestly successful poetry collections, short stories, and a novel before The Color Purple. Walker’s epistolary novel The Color Purple was an immediate success. Steven Spielberg directed an acclaimed film version in 1985. A Broadway musical followed in 2005, and it was remade as a film musical in 2023. The Color Purple became one of the most banned books in the United States within a few years of its publication, because of its depictions of violence, abuse, and homosexuality and its graphic language. Walker also courted controversy with her outspokenness about her personal life and her political opinions. Her criticism of Israel and her praise of Holocaust denier David Icke led to accusations of anti-Semitism, which she denied. She was open about her spirituality, her sexuality, and her relationships with men and women. She staged a wedding ceremony with her dog and her cat in 2006 because, she said, she wanted to honor her connection to the animals. The 2022 publication of 500 pages of her journals spanning from 1965 to 2000 gave the world an even more intimate look at her life. She chronicled both the extraordinary—working on the film set of The Color Purple with Spielberg—and the mundane—wondering how she would pay her rent in 1977.