The color purple : a novel, Walker, Alice
First published : 1983No. of pages : 244
A. Facts:
1. When/where did the author live? Does this shed light on the book?
Alice Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, on February 9, 1944. She was the youngest of eight children. Her father was a sharecropper, i.e. a tenant farmer who pays a share of his crop as rent to the owner of the land. At the age of eight a gun accident left her blind in one eye. This accident made her a solitary person. In 1965 she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, where she majored in literature.
Her background sheds light on the book because being black and poor in the U.S.A , Alice Walker got to know what racial and sexual discrimination is all about.
Encouraged by her mother, an uncle, and her teacher, she went to university after she had finished school.
In the sixties she was inspired by Martin Luther King, whose face was the first black face she had ever seen on T.V, and joined the civil rights movement. She married a Jewish civil rights worker and moved to Mississippi. She now l