Week 1
Periods 1-2 ：Get to know Alice Walker

Tasks (In class):

1. Read about Alice Walker and complete the test.

2. Answer the question (作业中上传）:  What are the major themes of Alice Walker’s writings? 

Homework (After class):

Watch the video clip about Alice Walker.

Alice Walker

Questions：What are the major themes of Alice Walker's writings? Why so?

Alice Walker (1944- ) is a famous American black woman novelist, poet, and essayist. Born in a poor rural family in Eatonton, Georgia, Her parents made a living by growing cottons. Alice is the youngest of the eight children in the family. She is a lover of literature, especially fond of novels and poems. When she went to Sarah Lawrence College in the early 1960s, the civil rights movement was in full swing. She was actively involved in the movement. After her graduation, Alice became a teacher of creative writing and black literature, lecturing in several colleges of eastern coast, such as Jackson State College, Yale and University of California and so on.

Alice Walker’s writing career began with the publication of a volume of poetry in 1968, which was followed by a number of novels, short stories, critical essays and more poetry. She has now become one of the most prominent writers in American Literature and is regarded as a most forceful representative of women literature and black literature. Alice is expert at portraying people in rural areas and she often takes her hometown as the background in her writing. She is particularly interested in examining relationship among the blacks themselves, and concerns more about the life of black women.

Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, the eighth and last child of Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker, who were sharecroppers. When Alice Walker was eight years old, she lost sight of one eye when one of her older brothers shot her with a BB gun by accident. In high school, Alice Walker was valedictorian of her class, and that achievement, coupled with a "rehabilitation scholarship" made it possible for her to go to Spelman, a college for black women in Atlanta, Georgia. After spending two years at Spelman, she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and during her junior year traveled to Africa as an exchange student. She received her bachelor of arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965.  

After finishing college, Walker lived for a short time in New York, then from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, she lived in Tougaloo, Mississippi, during which time she had a daughter, Rebecca, in 1969. Alice Walker was active in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's, and in the 1990's she is still an involved activist. She has spoken for the women's movement, the anti-apartheid movement, for the anti-nuclear movement, and against female genital mutilation. Alice Walker started her own publishing company, Wild Trees Press, in 1984. She currently resides in Northern California with her dog, Marley.

She received the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for The Color Purple. Among her numerous awards and honors are the Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters, a nomination for the National Book Award, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, a Merrill Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Front Page Award for Best Magazine Criticism from the Newswoman's Club of New York. She also has received the Townsend Prize and a Lyndhurst Prize.

Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” was originally published in Love and Trouble; stories of Black women, a collection of short stories, published in 1973 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. in New York. “Everyday Use” was again published in In Love and Trouble; stories of Black women by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. in 1974. Finally, Rutgers University Press in New Brunswick, NJ published “Everyday Use” in 1994.

Alice Walker's Literature achievement:

Volumes of poetry: Once (1968), Revolutionary Petunias and other Poems (1973)

Biography: A Biography of Langston Hughes (1973)

Collections of short stories: Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973)

Novels: The third Life of Grange Copeland (1970),  Meridian (1977),  The Temple of My Familiar (1989),  The Color Purple (1982),  By the Father’s Smile (1998)

Of all the works, The Color Purple is her best one which won all the three major book awards in America—the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The novel was an instant bestseller and made into an equally successful movie in 1985.

Homework: Watch the video clip to learn more about Alice Walker.