Motherhood In Alice Walker's The Color Purple

Alice Walker was born February 9, 1944 in the small town of Eatonton, Georgia to the parents of William Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Grant Walker. Walker’s parents were sharecroppers, like many African Americans, which sometimes made feeding a large family a challenge. While playing with her brothers, she accidentally got shot in the eye with a BB gun, resulting in permanent blindness. Walker has considered this accident the “catalyst for her retreat into the world of books” (Gillespie, Critical). Due to the disability of her eye, Walker received a scholarship to Spelman College in Atlanta in 1961. Here, she became very involved with the Civil Rights Movement. She then transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where she began professional writing. After graduating from college, Walker went to Mississippi to help with the Civil Right Movement, where she met a young lawyer, Melvyn Leventhal. Walker married Leventhal March 1967. Their first and only child, Rebecca Grant Walker, was born in 1969. In 1976, due to increasing tension in their relationship, Leventhal and Walker divorced. …show more content…
Her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, played a key role in establishing her reputation. Walker often writes about race, and the difficulties of motherhood. Her masterpiece is The Color Purple. This novel deals with controversial issues such as poverty, domestic violence, and racism. Despite some harsh reviews, this novel has won awards including the National Book Award for fiction and the Pulitzer prize for fiction. Walker has also written short stories, including “Everyday Use.” Symbols meaningful to the African American community are portrayed in Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use” with themes of the importance of heritage and dangers of materialism beings depicted in Dee