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Alice Walker Research Papers

Decent Essays

Mary Grace Furmanchik
Mrs. Coggins
English 311
18 April 2016
The Building Blocks of Alice Walker Alice Walker, an american writer, was born in Putnam, Georgia, and was the youngest of her eight siblings. Her father, Willie Walker, was “wonderful at math, but a terrible farmer” and made around $4,000 dollars in today's money by sharecropping and dairy farming. Her mother, Millie Grant, worked as a maid 11 hours a day to help send Alice to college. Growing up listening to her grandfather's stories of his past, Walker began building her empire for writing. When Walker was 8 years old, one of her brothers accidently shot her in the right eye with a BB gun. The Walkers, being poor and car-less, did not get Alice to a doctor in time to prevent …show more content…

The main character, Grange, is a poor sharecropper in Baker County, Georgia. The lard labour eventually becomes too much, and he escapes to the North. Walker shares that the storyline is based on a true event that occurred in her own hometown, the murder of a woman and mother by her husband and the father of her children. The novel contains many references to the violence of blacks, and even some whites, under the control white supremacy in the southern states. Walker found this book very difficult to write due to her own personal experiences in Mississippi. In 1982, Alice Walker published the most critically acclaimed novel of her career. The Color Purple is a novel that won awards like the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The book focuses on the lives of African American women in the 1930’s and their insignificance in the American society. Throughout the book, many elements of symbolism like racism and sexism, nontraditional gender roles, sisterhood, and women’s rights are …show more content…

In The Color Purple the whole story is based of a character who overcomes the oppression of male dominance and finds self assertivation. “Womanist was a term Walker used for feminist of color, who loves women’s culture, music, dance, the spirit, and herself. Her definition would transform black women’s literary criticism and had a major impact on feminism in general.”(Gillespie 11) Walker also was greatly influenced by Zora Neale Hurston, an African American woman writer during the Roaring 20’s. By definition, Hurston was considered a womanist to

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