ALICE WALKER

Alice Malsenior Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the daughter of a sharecropper. Her life in the rural South gave her the first hand knowledge of social injustices that would later be so influential to her writing. Her book, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), dealt with the story of a black tenant farmer who deserted his family and returned after suffering humiliation in the North to kill his wife.

Having graduated from Sarah Lawrence Collage in 1966, she was writer in residence and a teacher of black studies at Jackson State Collage (1968-1969), Tougaloo College (1970-1971), and a lecturer in literature at both Wellesley and the University of Massachusetts from 1972 to 1973.

In the 1960s, she was active in the support of the Civil Rights movement and she became an outspoken feminist in the 1970s.