Walker, Alice

"Being black, being a woman, and being a writer is just the most wonderful challenge. It’s like having three eyes, three hearts, rather than one," says the author of The Color Purple in this profile, as she relives her journey from an impoverished childhood in rural Georgia to the peace and creativity of her present life in northern California. Alice Walker describes how the Civil Rights movement transformed her life, defines her concept of "womanism," and explains her recurrent theme of a woman’s recovery of wholeness through resistance to racism and sexism. (33 minutes)

Perhaps best known for The Color Purple, which won both the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, Alice Walker has a varied body of work that includes novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and nonfiction—much of it informed by her experience of growing up under Jim Crow laws in Georgia, where her parents fought for the right to teach Alice to read. In this program, Walker explains what she calls the “womanist” perspective of The Color Purple and other novels. Part of the series In Black and White: Six Profiles of African American Authors. (31 minutes)