The Color Purple Research Paper
Alice Walker is an American author and poet. She wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
She was the youngest of eight children, born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, in the Deep South of the United States. When she eight, she was wounded in the eye by a shot from a BB gun fired by one of her brothers. This accident blinded her in one eye. As a result, she became more shy, thoughtful and studious; this is when she began to write stories.
Walker studied at Spelman College, a college for black women, in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1961. She then transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in 1963, where she took her degree in 1965.
In 1967, she married Melvyn R. Levanthal; their daughter was born in 1969; they were divorced in 1976. They were illegally married as he was white and society didn’t accept their marriage. From 1967 to 1974, they were involved in the Civil Right Movement in Mississippi, which fought to end segregation. …show more content…
Walker says that she admires Zora Neale Hurston’s “complete, undiminished sense of self” and she aims to replicate Hurston’s ability “to let her characters be themselves”. She admires the way that Hurston was “incapable of being embarrassed by anything black people did, and so was able to write about everything”. Furthermore, she appreciated Jean Toomer’s “feminine sensibility” as it was “unlike most black male
She was the youngest of eight children, born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, in the Deep South of the United States. When she eight, she was wounded in the eye by a shot from a BB gun fired by one of her brothers. This accident blinded her in one eye. As a result, she became more shy, thoughtful and studious; this is when she began to write stories.
Walker studied at Spelman College, a college for black women, in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1961. She then transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in 1963, where she took her degree in 1965.
In 1967, she married Melvyn R. Levanthal; their daughter was born in 1969; they were divorced in 1976. They were illegally married as he was white and society didn’t accept their marriage. From 1967 to 1974, they were involved in the Civil Right Movement in Mississippi, which fought to end segregation. …show more content…
Walker says that she admires Zora Neale Hurston’s “complete, undiminished sense of self” and she aims to replicate Hurston’s ability “to let her characters be themselves”. She admires the way that Hurston was “incapable of being embarrassed by anything black people did, and so was able to write about everything”. Furthermore, she appreciated Jean Toomer’s “feminine sensibility” as it was “unlike most black male