The Color Purple
About the Author
Alice Walker was born into a sharecropping family in rural Georgia in 1944. After coming top of her class in a segregated high school, she won a scholarship to college, and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York in 1965. On returning to the South, she worked in Mississippi: for the NAACP, as a writer-in-residence, and as a college teacher. She was an activist in the civil rights and feminist movements – notably as a contributor to Ms magazine and a pioneer in the rehabilitation of neglected writers of colour such as Zora Neale Hurston. After publishing novels and poetry during the 1970s she gained widespread international acclaim for The Color Purple, for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Since then, she has continued to work as a writer – of fiction, poetry, memoir and essays – and an activist who developed the theory of ‘womanism’ to explore her experience as a feminist of colour.