Alice Walker

Before she began her writing career, Alice Walker was an activist in the Civil Rights movement and a committed member of the NAACP. Drawing from these and her experiences as a woman of color in the Jim Crow south, Walker forged a voice for herself that is at once politically engaged, deeply personal, and poetic. In 1975, with a novel and a collection of short stories already published, Walker wrote an article for Ms. Magazine about Zora Neale Hurston's unjustly forgotten body of work that sparked academic interest and eventually brought Hurston back to prominence in American letters. Walker's highly acclaimed second novel, Meridian, arrived in '76 but it wasn't until The Color Purple that everything changed, garnering Walker the Pulitzer Prize and the additional honor of being the first African-American woman to win it. Wildly disparate responses to both the novel and Stephen Spielberg's film adaptation of Purple eventually drove Walker from the spotlight and deeper into explorations of her spirituality. In the estimation of many critics, The Temple of My Familiar—the novel her mystical pursuits produced—undermined her stature as a writer of serious literature. In '92, Possessing the Secret of Joy, a novel protesting genital mutilation rituals in Africa, helped her shake some of the New Age tags stuck to her reputation. Walker maintains her prolific output of fiction, poetry, and essays, and continues using her undying political interests and activist spirit as a creative wellspring.