Alice Walker

Alice Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children of sharecroppers. When she was eight, a brother shot her with a BB gun, and she lost the sight in her right eye. She studied at Spelman College in Atlanta and Sarah Lawrence College in New York, then worked in the civil rights movement in Mississippi.

She published poetry, stories and essays through the 1970s and coined the term "womanist" for a feminism rooted in the lives of Black women. The Color Purple (1982) is told mostly in letters by Celie, a poor Black woman in rural Georgia who is abused by her father and her husband and slowly finds her voice through other women. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the first for a Black woman, and the National Book Award. It became a 1985 film and a Broadway musical.

Some critics said the novel portrayed Black men harshly. In later years she drew criticism for praising the books of David Icke, whose writing many call antisemitic. She lives in Northern California.