Beauty When The Other Dancer Is The Self Summary

Alice walker was born February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia the youngest of the eight children of sharecroppers Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker (poetry.org). In 1952 when she was only eight years old, she lost her right eye site in a game of cowboys and Indians when she was shot in the eye with a BB gun by her older brother, Curtis. To avoid getting in trouble her brothers came up with a story and made Alice follow along. Several years later, when she was fourteen years old, her brothers provided her with the encouragement and resources to get eye surgery. She describes the impact of this surgery in the essay: “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self” (emory.edu). In 1961 she left her hometown in Eatonton, Georgia to attend Spelman College, a predominant school for African American woman in Atlanta, on a state scholarship. During the two years she attended Spelman (in 1961) she became a passionate activist in the civil rights movement. After
She became the first African American woman in history to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature as well as winning the national book award for her book ‘The Color Purple’ in 1983. The book later became a movie produced by Steven Spielberg in 1985 and was adapted for the stage in 2005 and preformed on Broadway in New York as a musical (pbs.org). Just a few of her other works include ‘The Third Life of Grange Copeland’ published in 1970, ‘Meridian’ published in 1976, ‘The Color Purple’ published in 1982, ‘The Temple Of My Familiar’ published in 1989, ‘Possessing The Secret Of Joy’ published in 1992, ‘By the Light Of My Fathers Smile’ published in 1998 along with multiple other novels, short stories, and poems