Alice Walker: Reaping the Ancestor's Garden

"Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender." (Alice Walker) Alice Walker, (born 1944), the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her novel, The Color Purple . The author of multiple novels, volumes of poetry, collections of short stories, children's books, and essays, she is perhaps best known for the landmark novel that focuses on Celie, a disaffected black woman from the rural South who has been deliberately disconnected from her children. Our text points out that Walker was interviewed in 1973 by scholar Mary Helen Washington, in which the author professed a commitment to portraying the lives of black women in her novels. Gates, et al. observe that Walker "described the three types of black women characters she felt were missing from much of the literature of the United States. The first were those who were exploited both physically and emotionally, whose lives were narrow and confining, and who were driven sometimes to madness, ...